You made it sound like? Of course it is handled by the spec, the issue here is in ntpd not following the spec (assuming what the author says is true, I haven't

You made it sound like? Of course it is handled by the spec, the issue here is in ntpd not following the spec (assuming what the author says is true, I haven't checked). Or actually there is this little tidbit from RFC 5905: > Eras cannot be produced by NTP directly, nor is there need to do so. When necessary, they can be derived from external means, such as the filesystem or dedicated hardware. So it could be that ntpd looks at some file or the rtc to determine the era rather than assuming the current system time is in the correct era, and it would be allowed by the spec. But it's quite inconsistent if it only does it if the system time is more than a few milliseconds off (presumably beyond the limit of when it corrects the time by time stretching). I'm going to go with it just being a bug in ntpd.