🚀 go-pugleaf

Tim,

On closer inspection at wwvb.isi.edu earlier today I found the Spectracom
clock wandering 25 minutes slow, but ticking correct format and quality
indicator. As of now (2129Z 24 Feb) it has returned to truetick. This is
the first time I have seen this kind of wobble. All previous wobbles 
known to me have involved onboard clock silicon failures such as stuck
hot and cold bits and microprocessor hiccups. What worries me is that
the wwvb hardware has recently been gutted and replaced with the innards
of the new Spectracom Netclock/II, which they just announced. I sure
hope this particular wobble is not species-specific, since I would like
to upgrade four of the other Spectracom 8170 clocks now used at other
primary servers. The new clock, as well as the upgrade, now decode the
year and leap information, which would be a Good Thing and also simplify
my life in the first moments of every New Year.

As Tim noted, several secondary sites got warped along with the wwvb
server itself. Some ten out of about 120 chimers at wwvb warped tick in
this way. This shouldn't happen with strategically configured peers as
recommended in the pub/ntp/ntpinfo file on louie.udel.edu and in many
messages sent to this list and published in various RFCs and other
documents. In addition, I can say that a version-3 server has considerably
more resistance to falsetickers than the previous versions now indigent
to the present Unix daemons. In reviewing the statistics collected by
a version-3 fuzzball near here during a five-day interval including the
wwvb warp, I found the mean error 0.768 ms, standard deviation 1.782 ms
and max error +4.922 -2.579 referenced to its other stratum-1 peers,
including wwvb. However, during this interval 4 of the 9 configured peers
became warped for at least long enough to get noticed. I suspect some
of these warps were due to reboots and zoon, but it also reveals that
the wwvb warp was gloriously ignored.

Dave