freebsd-dev/contrib/ntp/html/y2k.htm
1999-12-09 13:01:21 +00:00

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Network Time Protocol Year 2000 Conformance Statement
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Network Time Protocol Year 2000 Conformance Statement
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<img align=left src=pic/alice15.gif>
from <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i>, by Lewis Carroll,
illustrations by Sir John Tenniel
<p>The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are discussing whether the Teapot
serial number should have two or four digits.
<br clear=left><hr>
<h4>Introduction</h4>
By the year 2000, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) will have been in
use for over two decades and remain the longest running, continuously
operating application protocol in the Internet. There is some concern,
especially in government and financial institutions, that NTP might
cause Internet applications to misbehave in terrible ways on the epoch
of the next century. This document presents an analysis of the various
hazards that might result in incorrect time values upon this epoch. It
concludes that incorrect time values due to the NTP timescale, protocol
design and reference implementation are highly unlikely. However, it is
possible that external reference time sources used by NTP could
misbehave and cause NTP servers to distribute incorrect time values to
significant portions of the Internet. Note that, while this document
addresses the issues specifically with respect to Unix systems, the
issues are equally applicable to Windows and VMS systems.
<h4>The NTP Timescale</h4>
It will be helpful in understanding the issues raised in this document
to consider the concept of a universal timescale. The conventional civil
timescale used in most parts of the world is based on Universal
Coordinated Time (UTC sic), formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
UTC is based on International Atomic Time (TAI sic), which is derived
from hundreds of cesium clocks in the national standards laboratories of
many countries. Deviations of UTC from TAI are implemented in the form
of leap seconds, which occur on average every eighteen months. For
almost every computer application today, UTC represents the universal
timescale extending into the indefinite past and indefinite future. We
know of course that the UTC timescale did not exist prior to 1972, the
Gregorian calendar did not exist prior to 1582, the Julian calendar did
not exist prior to 54 BC and we cannot predict exactly when the next
leap second will occur. Nevertheless, most folks would prefer that, even
if we can't get future seconds numbering right beyond the next leap
second, at least we can get the days numbering right until the end of
reason.
<p>The universal timescale can be implemented using a binary counter of
indefinite width and with the unit seconds bit placed somewhere in the
middle. The counter is synchronized to UTC such that it runs at the same
rate and the units increment coincides with the UTC seconds tick. The
NTP timescale is constructed from 64 bits of this counter, of which 32
bits number the seconds and 32 bits represent the fraction. With this
design, the counter runs in 136-year cycles, called eras, the latest of
which began with a counter value of zero at 0h 1 January 1900. The
design assumption is that further low order bits, if required, are
provided by local interpolation, while further high order bits, when
required, are provided by external means. The important point to be made
here is that the high order bits must ultimately be provided by
astronomers and disseminated to the population by international means.
Ultimately, should a need exist to align a particular NTP era to the
current calendar, the operating system in which NTP is embedded must
provide the necessary high order bits, most conveniently from the file
system or flash memory.
<h4>The Year 2000 Era</h4>
With respect to the year 2000 issue, the most important thing to observe
about the NTP timescale is that it knows nothing about days, years or
centuries, only the seconds since the beginning of the latest era, the
current one of which began on 1 January 1900. On 1 January 1970 when
Unix life began, the NTP timescale showed 2,208,988,800 and on 1 January
1972 when UTC life began, it showed 2,272,060,800. On the last second of
year 1999, the NTP timescale will show 3,155,672,599 and one second
later on the first second of the next century will show 3,155,672,600.
Other than this observation, the NTP timescale has no knowledge of or
provision for any of these eclectic seconds.
<p>The NTP timescale is almost never used directly by system or
application programs. The generic Unix kernel keeps time in seconds and
microseconds (or nanoseconds) to provide both time of day and interval
timer functions. In order to synchronize the Unix clock, NTP must
convert to and from its representation and Unix representation. Unix
kernels implement the time of day function using two 32-bit counters,
one representing the seconds since Unix life began and the other the
microseconds or nanoseconds of the second. In principle, the seconds
counter will wrap around in 136-year eras, the next of which will begin
in 2106. How the particular Unix semantics interprets the counter values
is of concern, but is beyond the scope of discussion here.
<p>While incorrect time values due to the NTP timescale and protocol
design or reference implementation upon the epoch of the next century
are highly unlikely, hazards remain due to incorrect software external
to NTP. These hazards include the Unix kernel and library routines which
convert Unix time to and from conventional civil time in seconds,
minutes, hours, days and years. Although NTP uses these routines to
format monitoring data displays, they are not used to read or set the
NTP clock. They may in fact cause problems with certain application
programs, but this is not an issue which concerns NTP correctness.
<p>While it is extremely unlikely that NTP will produce incorrect time
values upon the epoch, it is possible that some external source to which
NTP synchronizes may produce a discontinuity which could then induce a
NTP discontinuity. The NTP primary (stratum 1) time servers, which are
the ultimate time references for the entire NTP population, obtain time
from various sources, including radio and satellite receivers and
telephone modems. Not all sources provide year information and not all
of these provide time in four-digit form. In point of fact, the NTP
reference implementation does not use the year information, even if
available. Instead, the year information is provided from the file
system, which itself depends on the Unix clock.
<p>The NTP protocol specification requires the apparent NTP time derived
from external servers to be compared to the file system time before the
clock is set. If the discrepancy is over 1000 seconds, an error alarm is
raised requiring manual intervention. This makes it very unlikely that
even a clique of seriously corrupted NTP servers will result in
incorrect time values. In the case of embedded computers with no file
system, the design assumption is that the current era be established
from flash memory or a clock chip previously set by manual means.
<p>It is essential that any clock synchronization protocol, including
NTP, include provisions for multiple-server redundancy and multiple-
route diversity. Past experience has demonstrated the wisdom of this
approach, which protects clients against hardware and software faults,
as well as incorrectly operating reference sources and sometimes even
buggy software. For the most reliable service, we recommend multiple
reference sources for primary servers, including a backup radio or
satellite receiver or telephone modem. We also recommend that primary
servers run NTP with other primary servers to provide additional
redundancy and mutual backup should the reference sources themselves
fail or operate incorrectly.
<hr><a href=index.htm><img align=left src=pic/home.gif></a><address><a
href=mailto:mills@udel.edu> David L. Mills &lt;mills@udel.edu&gt;</a>
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