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No need to panic; this event happend a few days ago, August 1. And no one's certain, but it seems just as likely this is a bug in NTP as it is a deliberate attempt to crash unpatched Linux servers. The way ntpd manages the leap second flag is pretty complex and error prone.

Link to thread view of NTP list discussion: http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/thread....

The fix needs backporting large patchset, yet the next leap second isn't announced. So no need to rush... just wait for a while and do QA. Typical mentality.
Exactly how incompetent are linux coders? After all, the "problem" is extremely trivial.
Feel free to patch it, I'm sure the world of linux coders would be happy to have someone who finds this sort of matter trivial in their midst.
Well, I'm not a linux coder, but I'll give it a try and report back if I'm successful.
DateTime code bugs happen all the time, there are so much things to consider and it's hard to test, because the problem conditions might not occur for years to come. Remember this? http://news.cnet.com/new-years-hangover-for-zune-users/ (also I too am guilty of producing a similar bug in a software a few years ago)
An idea: Setup a fake NTP server that inserts leap seconds randomly (for example, once a week) (forward and backward). It could be use with test servers to test if they are working correctly, before a real leap second crash the production server.
Leap seconds only occur at the end of a month, so an NTP client that accepted such leapseconds would be non-compliant.