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NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

jtokoph

Comments (143)

  • semenko
    I found the most interesting part of the NIST outage post [1] is NIST's special Time Over Fiber (TOF) program [2] that "provides high-precision time transfer by other service arrangements; some direct fiber-optic links were affected and users will be contacted separately."I've never heard of this! Very cool service, presumably for … quant / HFT / finance firms (maybe for compliance with FINRA Rule 4590 [3])? Telecom providers synchronizing 5G clocks for time-division duplexing [4]? Google/hyperscalers as input to Spanner or other global databases?Seriously fascinating to me -- who would be a commercial consumer of NIST TOF?[1] https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-se...[2] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...[3] https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/4...[4] https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/8/what-you-need-to-kno...
  • loph
    Only Boulder servers lost sync.To say NIST was off is clickbait hyperbole.This page: https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi shows that NIST has > 16 NTP servers on IPv4, of those, 5 are in Boulder and were affected by the power failure. The rest were fine.However, most entities should not be using these top-level servers anyway, so this should have been a problem for exactly nobody.IMHO, most applications should use pool.ntp.org
  • ziml77
    Nitpick: UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time. The ordering of the letters was chosen to not match the English or the French names so neither language got preference.
  • ComputerGuru
    Not exactly the topic of discussion but also not not on topic: just wanted to sing praise for chrony which has performed better than the traditional os-native NTP clients in our testing on a myriad of real and virtualized hardware.
  • politelemon
    I'm missing the nuance or perhaps the difference between the first scenario where sending inaccurate time was worse than sending no time, versus the present where they are sending inaccurate time. Sorry if it's obvious.
  • meindnoch
    I know some HFT people who made a few hundred K off of this.
  • asdfman123
    I find this topic and thread fascinating.I took too much Adderall today.
  • voidUpdate
    Maybe I missed something, but I don't quite understand the video title "NIST's NTP clock was microseconds from disaster". Is there some limit of drift before it's unrecoverable? Can't they just pull the correct time from the other campus if it gets too far off?
  • Topgamer7
    Out of curiosity, can anyone say the most impactful things they've needed incredibly accurate time for?
  • gnabgib
  • V__
    Has anyone here ever needed microsecond precision? Would love to hear about it.
  • mmmlinux
    Are there any plans being made to prevent this happening in the future?
  • geetee
    Now I'm curious... How the hell do you synchronize clocks to such an extreme accuracy? Anybody have a good resource before I try to find one myself?
  • ChrisArchitect
    More discussion:NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Powerhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334299
  • anon
    undefined
  • qmr
    Gah, just when you think you can trust time.nist.govSuggestions from the community for more reliable alternatives?