Mills@UDEL.EDU (03/20/88)
Folks, At the moment both the ISI and NCAR radio clocks have failed, while the UDel radio clock is down for repair. This leaves only the UMd and Ford radio clocks online. Unfortunately, sometime since Friday evening the NTP primary time-server network, which usually thrives when one or more radio clocks fail, went nuts and may have delivered bogus time. I believe I have found and fixed the bug, which turned out to be subtle indeed and bit only in an interesting and unusual scenario involving broken spanning trees. As of now (Saturday afternoon) all primary servers ISI, NCAR, UDel, UMd, Ford and DECWRL have been fixed. Note that all except UMd and Ford are running at stratum two, since they have automatically resynchronized to the remaining radio clocks. Secondary servers at Linkabit and Rice, now operating at their usual stratum two, have also been fixed. There is at least one Unix site that crashed due the broken time. Since the bug was due to my own error and not due to the protocol design or Mike Petry's NTP daemon, I do apologize for any inconvenience. When a new NTP daemon conforming to the latest protocol revision becomes available, even this latest bug will not cause timewarps, should something like it ever happen again. Dave