Re: [dhcwg] [ntpwg] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-ogud-dhc-udp-time-option-01.txt

[Harlan Stenn <[e-mail]>]

Warner Losh writes:
> On Dec 2, 2013, at 12:58 PM, Harlan Stenn wrote:
>> It's actually fuzzier than that, and this situation (which is handled
>> differently with ntpd under unix, ntpd under windows, and on systems
>> that "smear" the leap second over a longer period) is one of the
>> cases handled by the General Timestamp API project at Network Time
>> Foundation, described at http://nwtime.org/projects/timestamp-api/ .
> 
> Actually, in all those cases it is within a second of the 'real' time,
> hence specifying that it should be one second or the other seems
> appropriate. The timestamp APIs are for sub-second resolution, while the
> time_t in this protocol has only a second resolution... The main point
> is that it should be (a) specified to be what's going to most likely
> happen (or keep bounds on the error)  and (b) something sane that
> doesn't introduce errors > tolerance of the protocol. Having it be
> completely unspecified is a mistake, since -1 could be returned...

I'd suspect that usually 1 second will be the ballpark, but it's pretty
easy to find situations where the system clock is out by more than that.

I mention the General Timestamp API because that effort is looking at
use cases like this one from a larger persepective.

H