One day, the clock was turn off and on and it went 1024 weeks backwards because the time GPS time protocol sucks and use a week counter with too few bits.
Apparently a GPS clock can keep track of the time if it’s up and running when the week counter overflows, otherwise it has to take a wild guess. Apparently their hardware GPS clock used a hardcoded start time from its firmware instead of trusting a less reliable existing clock.
The article finishes with some AI looking suggestions to prevent such an issue to happen again.
Mine would be to have bought one or two more GPS clocks and not from the same provider.
https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/what-we-ve-learned-from-...
https://www.telstra.com.au/content/dam/tcom/dynamic-media-pr...
Runs in my loft, what a time to be alive.
This is the perfect description of Telstra as a company.
I saw the talk version of that and it has lodged in my memory. The point he made was that "health.gov" was made by a bunch of teams that made sure that their part worked, but nobody was in charge of making the whole thing work.
This is sadly "normal" for large bureaucracies.
Every time I see a giant, multi-million dollar catastrophe, it's always "proper", "documented", "enterprise", "by the book", and... "a total failure". The reason is always that nobody actually cares about the final outcome, only the paperwork in front of them that they need fill out, the checkbox that needs to be ticked, or the compliance requirement that needs to be met.
I do use ChatGPT to resolve vague memories of articles read long ago into concrete URLs I can share, which is one of the best uses of the accursed things right now!
I assure you that I am an organic meat human like yourself and the article dates itself to the “before times” and can also be trusted to be free of contamination.
It won’t last, but just as Google was so much better than hotbit, altavista, yahoo etc back in the day.
> This design from 2010 had at the top stratum 1 sources at Australia's National Measurement Institute (NMI)
> Among otherwise comparable candidates, the lower stratum carries more weight.
The source is still the same - your grandmaster (ptp) or sync generator (b+b) is fed from a good timing source - often GPS, with one or two inputs, but sometimes local atomic clocks.
I’ve seen issues before with 40ms audio gaps when a GPS antenna has died and the coders can’t cope with frame drift so they incentive a 40ms silence in the audio every 40 minutes or so as the source and destination clocks are different speeds by about 1 part in 60,000.
In DAB the tolerances are far lower, there was a problem about 10 years ago due to a GPs satellite being a few microseconds off
https://www.radioworld.com/trends-1/gps-anomalies-caused-pro...
That timing requires a very tight time, frequency and phase reference. It’s derived from local high stability GNSS-disciplined time references.
It happened twenty years ago...
;-)