# Unexpected leap second?

## Aphax

To my surprise, my minecraft server started misbehaving again today and I found that *another* leap second was added to my gentoo server:

```
Aug  1 01:59:59 server1 kernel: [701327.408241] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
```

As far as I understand it, this was only supposed to happen once this year, on June 30th? I'm currently using ntpd, with the standard gentoo pool NTP servers configured (*.gentoo.pool.ntp.org). Has anyone else gotten this, and is this normal? If not, is there something I can or should do to fix this?

(I have since applied a temporary fix to at least stop Java from misbehaving, obviously it would be better to just upgrade kernel but since this is a remote server I need to plan this somewhat carefully. Right now though I'm simply worried about unexpected leap seconds :p)

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## EatMeerkats

Looks like I got one too, although you're right that there shouldn't have been one:

```
[3365488.404022] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
```

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## EatMeerkats

More discussion

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## Hu

 *Aphax wrote:*   

> (I have since applied a temporary fix to at least stop Java from misbehaving, obviously it would be better to just upgrade kernel but since this is a remote server I need to plan this somewhat carefully. Right now though I'm simply worried about unexpected leap seconds :p)

 You can use the workaround discovered after the real leap second, which should fully resolve the symptoms.  Use date to set the clock to the current value of the clock, which will have the side effect of resynchronizing the internal timekeeping logic.  Since leap seconds are inserted on the last day of the month, the next opportunity for an inappropriate leap second is a few weeks out, even if all the relevant NTP servers continue to advertise a bogus leap second.

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## Aphax

Yeah that's what I meant by the temporary fix  :Smile:  Thanks though!

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