Re: number of seconds since the epoch

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell+netbsd%mumble.net@localhost>]

   Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2010 02:26:35 +0000
   From: Taylor R Campbell <campbell+netbsd%mumble.net@localhost>

   This looks great.  However, I went through the NTP man pages and HTML
   documentation in /usr/share/doc/html/ntp (which are pretty poorly
   synchronized, it seems), and tried various things, and couldn't figure
   out precisely what you mean by `setup ntp thusly'; in no configuration
   I tried was I able to elicit a TAI offset other than 0 from ntptime or
   ntp_gettime.  Can you be more specific?  I'd like just to configure
   ntpd on a single host -- I don't want to set up my own NTP server.

I had to

. fetch leap-seconds.list from the NIST into /etc/ntp/,

. add `crypto leap /etc/ntp/leap-seconds.list' to /etc/ntp.conf, and

. for no reason I can discern other than to appease the crypto keyword
  in ntp.conf, use ntp-keygen to generate a key pair in /etc/ntp/.

Then, after I started ntpd and waited for a while, `ntptime' reported
the correct TAI - UTC offset.

I don't see any logic in the ntpd, though, to update the leap seconds
file from the NTP server, and it appears to ignore any leap second
tables from NTP servers for which it has no public key.  Is there a
good way to make this automatic?  I presume time.nist.gov will at
least have the leap second table -- does it also have a key pair?

(I suppose such questions are better asked on an NTP mailing list.)