Guys, Sure, I'm stubborn as a bull. The laws of physics make me so.
I am dismissing any comparisons between ntpd and crony or any other vehicle unless the comparison includes substantially all the scenarios that ntpd is designed to work with. The protocol is specifically designed to work over a wide spectrum including lightly loaded LANs and highly congested WANs. The choice of parameters, specifically the time constant and operating range, was chosen as a compromise to maximize accuracy and minimize network loads under typical and extreme conditions. As for the SNTP restrictsions, please, please read the draft specification, which explains exactly what SNTP should and should not do. At the crux of the matter is the impulse response of a cascade of intervening servers each with its own idiosyncratic impulse response. The NTP impulse response has a controlled risetime and overshoot over a wide range of time constants. Each server in the cascade must have the same impulse response to avoid instabilities and possible whip effects. We could have simply specified the transfer function in polynomial form (it's in RFC 1305 and das Buch) and told the implementor to use that. A student of digital signal processing would know how to use that directly. But, we thought there would be folks like you that would not believe the principles and do something evil like bring up a pool server running openntp or crony and synchronized via a flaky circuit to Indonesia. It is easy to detect that a particular server has or has not the current reference implementation. There are a number of features intrinsic to the protocol design and others fiendishly crafted to do that, but I'm not going to reveal them here. Dave _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
