Phew. Up and running again.

[simont]

Electricians came back this afternoon, took up most of the upstairs floorboards, and traced the problem to a screw in a junction box which hadn't been tightened. So they tightened it, and now everything works again.

While they were there, though, they also noticed that my ring main fails to be a ring; so they downgraded me from a 32A to a 20A fuse on that circuit on general principles of safety, and they recommend I have it all redone properly at a later date.

Now I have to go out shopping: rapid power-cycling appears to have comprehensively nadgered my radio-synchronised alarm clock, with the result that it (a) can't radio-synchronise any more, and (b) won't make alarm noises. It does still work as a clock, if you manually set it, but that really isn't enough to be useful.

Comments

[timotab.livejournal.com]

Just out of interest, are you able (if it's working) to use your alarm clock for stratum-0 NTP?

[senji.livejournal.com]

WIBNI you could?

[simont]

I suppose I could have got synchronised time data from the clock to a computer if I'd pointed a webcam at it, but I'm not sure I'd have considered the result reliable enough to call stratum 0.

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

Still rather closer to stratum 0 than my hack which used a TV card to scrape the TeleText clock... (Back in the days of dial-up, when any non-Internet clock source at all started to seem like a good idea.)

On a related note, I'm constantly amazed that mobile phones do not appear to grab accurate time from their networks. Surely the network itself maintains an accurate clock, so why the heck does anyone ever have to set a phone's clock (innacurately) by hand?

[simont]

My last phone did get the time from its network, but – perhaps even more inexplicably – it was configured not to do so by default. No idea why.

[pm215]

IIRC a friend of mine who configured their phone to use network time found that it was several minutes slow...

[simont]

A quick google for "USB MSF" turns up this collection of products, for people really keen to synchronise their computers by means other than the Internet.

They seem to think, I note, that an MSF-synchronised computer is a stratum 1 server, not 0.

[timotab.livejournal.com]

yes. the MSF clock is S-0. the computer so synchronised is S-1