Mills@UDEL.EDU (05/16/88)
Folks, At about 2000 UT Saturday the NCAR primary NTP time server took a hit, with result that until about 1800 UT Sunday the year read 99, not 88. At about 0100 UT Saturday the UDel primary NTP time server also took a hit and chimed similar nonsense until fixed about an hour later. In all the NTP primary servers the year is determined (from a file) at boot time and can be changed subsequently only by an operator command. The year information is not part of the timecodes broadcast by NBS. In fact, I can find no evidence of TCP login near the time of warp in either case and have no reason to suspect operations staff at either location of any mischief. I therefore tentatively have classified the warps as zoo events and have alerted the hacker trackers. Those brave enough to be chiming NTP with one or more of the five NTP primary time servers should read Appendix D of the document found in the ~ftp/pub/ntp.doc file in the anonymous login at louie.udel.edu. This appendix suggests that secondary NTP time servers should peer with two of the five primary servers along with another secondary server known to peer with two different primary servers. The voting algorithm used by the Fuzzball and Unix daemons is designed to cast out falsetickers most effectively in such configurations. Dave