Re: [ntp:questions] Leap second to be introduced in June

2015-01-27 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathi...@tmsw.no writes:

The derivatives of sine/cosine are of course +/- cosine/sine, so they 
stay smooth at all levels.

The point is that it is not smooth where it joins on to the regular
passage of time... It is possible to do this in an infinitely smooth
way, but using the cos formula just gives a few continuous derivatives.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap second to be introduced in June

2015-01-26 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathi...@tmsw.no writes:

One of the good points about Google's smear is the fact that they use a 
half cosine to distribute the offset, which means that they have a time 
function which is both continuous and monotonic, as well as having an 
infinite number of defined derivatives, i.e. it is maximally smooth.

Doesn't it only have two smooth deritives at the end points or
[-w:w]? The usual function is constant 1 with all derivatves zero,
and so this is what the derivative should be at the endpoints. They
use (1.0 - cos(pi * t / w)) / 2.0, which is 1 at both end point,
has first derative zero, but the second deritive is -pi*pi/w/w.

(It should be possible to stitch together something that is infinitely
smooth, probably using exp(-1/(x*x)), but it would requite a bit
more work.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap second to be introduced in June

2015-01-23 Thread David Malone
William Unruh un...@invalid.ca writes:

General relativity assures us that time exists and is measured by a
metric. Take that metric and define a proper time say at the center of
the earth. Now one can ask whether TAI or UTC is a function of that
time. 

As Mike points out, you've subtracted things in a way that doesn't
really make sense to make this argument. Warner Losch has a good
way of describing this as variable radix. For example, we don't
describe the calendar as discontinuous, because months have 28, 29,
30 or 31 days.  If you subtract Feb 27th from Mar 3rd, you need to
know if it is a leap leap year, rather than say the answer is 7
days by assume all months have 31 days because most months do.

My personal way of viewing the topology of the space labels, is
that some second labels have multiple possible successor labels,
and the leap seconds look like little loops around which UTC may
or may not pass.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap second to be introduced in June

2015-01-22 Thread David Malone
William Unruh un...@invalid.ca writes:

Note UTC differs from TAI by an interger number of seconds, AND that
integer changes with the leap second. Ie, it cannot be continuous if TAI
is continuous. 

That assumes that UTC can be represented as a real number with the
standard topology, which doesn't seem to be what TF.460 says. It
describes each second as labelled, which means that you have to
stitch together all possible unit intervals for each second with
some topology, and then you can ask if the path taken by UTC through
this space is continuous.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] MSF Anthorn, UK down

2014-05-25 Thread David Malone
David Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

It looks like the UK MSF 60 KHz signal from Anthorn is down.  I've seen 
one report that a clock stopped at 00:04 this morning (but I don't know 
whether that was UTC or UTC+01:00).

I haven't got a sample from it for about 21h that made it to the
NTP server. The last minute that the decoder managed to process was:

uninverted A: 00010110110010101000110
uninverted B: 11100101010
uninverted Raw: 25/5/2014 0:04 Sun -300 DST 
uninverted Ctime: Sun May 25 00:04:01 2014

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap seconds

2013-12-31 Thread David Malone
David Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

Talking of leap seconds, I see not indication here from any of my 
servers, or their peers, of a leap-second, which is as it should be. 
Checking reminded me that I did write a simple program with which you 
can check your own NTP PCs, and it can be downloaded here:

I've added a graph showing the fraction of servers advertising
leapbits here:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leaps/

It doesn't look like there's too many confused servers this time.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Start of new GPS 1024 week epoch

2013-08-14 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at tmsw.no writes:

Nice!

You've replaced the 1024-week epoch with a +/- 512-week window around 
the current time. :-)

Indeed - ntp already sort of has to do a similar, because the
timestamps are mod 2^32 seconds from 1900, so using a trick like
this is only marginally distasteful ;-)

 I'm trying to adjust the timestamp given by NMEA might be slow by
 some multiple of 1024 weeks, and so tries to adjust it so that it
 is reasonably close to the system time associated with the read of
 the NMEA data.  I'm not sure if I've got the code exactly bang-on,
 but it has got ntp running with the unit again.

Looks good.

On Harlan's recommendation, I've opened a feature request with the
patch. If anyone notices any issues, I can log them there.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Start of new GPS 1024 week epoch

2013-08-14 Thread David Malone
David Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

Could you not use something like the timestamp of some file (e.g. the 
drift file) or other system file to get the approximate year?  I haven't 
studied the code (I find C not easy to read or navigate) so perhaps it 
already does this.  Then you would only need to set the real time once?

Possibly - this was a handy timestamp to use, but there may be a
better choice. It's also possible that this should be an optional
flag to the driver, so that people with perfectly good GPS units
won't ever trip over the code ;-)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Another invalid leap second

2013-07-05 Thread David Malone
Chris Adams c...@cmadams.net writes:

 remote   refid  st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==
-216.180.99.1152.2.21.1   3 u   75  128  3778.750   -3.704   2.198
-216.180.122.1   173.255.232.93   3 u  100  128  377   10.6931.763   2.047
*198.58.100.237  216.218.254.202  2 u  112  128  377   33.1760.153   2.465
+199.195.193.200 203.117.180.36   2 u   61  128  377  271.8177.875  22.267
+66.162.15.6564.236.96.53 2 u  105  128  377   25.8807.921   4.795
-50.116.38.157   130.207.244.240  2 u   88  128  377   23.243   -2.734   1.810
 127.127.8.0 .GPS.0 l  392   1600.0001.016   0.000
x127.127.22.0.GPS.0 l2   16  3770.000   -4.524   0.684

Unfortunately, there isn't much overlap between the servers I'm
monitoring and the servers you're using, so I can't add much. From
the refids, I have info for machines in UNC, gatech and he.net, and
none of them were advertising leap seconds.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Another invalid leap second

2013-07-03 Thread David Malone
Chris Adams c...@cmadams.net writes:

I have a Linux (Fedora 18) system running ntp-4.2.6p5-8.fc18.x86_64.  I
have a GPS receiver connected (old Trimble SVeeSix in TSIP mode).  I
have some pool servers plus my ISPs servers configured.  After some
discussion on a mailing list, I checked, and I got a leap second Sunday.
I see this in my log (my local time is CDT, UTC-0500):

I've been monitoring the leap second advertisment on a bunch of NTP
servers for the last few years. I've plotted some of the results at:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leaps/

If you let me know the list of peers/servers you're using, then I could
see if any are in the list I'm monitoring, and if they were advertising
a leap.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Do I have a lock to my NMEA GPS?

2012-11-12 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at tmsw.no writes:

David Woolley wrote:
 Terje Mathisen wrote:


 I don't know exactly how much power it needs, but since it runs easily
 on USB power, it has to use less than 500 mA @ 5V (2.5W), and probably
 significantly less.

 If you are using Linux, you can use lsusb to find the declared current
 consumption for the device, which should give you an upper bound on the
 power consumption.

FreeBSD, I don't know if that OS has something similar?

You can do something like this, I think:

usbconfig -d ugen1.4 dump_all_config_desc | grep -i power

It gives you a value in hex, something like this:

bMaxPower = 0x00fa

Which, I think, is the max current in 2mA units.  0x00fa is 250, or
500mA.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leapsecond on FreeBSD or Windows - no showstopper bugs, but ...

2012-07-01 Thread David Malone
My FreeBSD machines did fine, including the on connected to the Sure 
Electronics board.
I think the Sure GPS board repeated the 59th second, from the looks of the NMEA
outout, but I need to check that more carefully. I will check and see if I saw 
any
kind of reload later.

I took some other measurements at:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leap2012/

David.


___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Effect of Gigabit Interrupt coalescence on ntp timing

2012-06-14 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at tmsw.no writes:

I was thinking of sometime similar for the improved timestamping.

They will hardware timestamp both transmit and receive for all timing 
packets, enabling sub-us level transit time measurements.

FWIW, I think the Intel NICs in question support some 1588 features,
but I don't think you can get a timestamp for every packet. Or, when
I looked at the code/docs, I couldn't figure out how to do it. If
someone knows otherwise, I'd like to be corrected ;-)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Effect of Gigabit Interrupt coalescence on ntp timing

2012-06-12 Thread David Malone
unruh un...@invalid.ca writes:

I have posted a web page
www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/scatter/rt.html

Should the rx-users setting be rx-usecs? It would be nice if
some of these cards actually timestamped the frames when received
and then the timestamp provided by SO_TIMESTAMP or similar could
be corrected. It seems only a few cards can do this though.

(On FreeBSD these interrupt mitigation techniques should be tweakable
using the sysctls under the dev.em sysctl tree.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Any chance of getting bugs 2164 and 1577 moving?

2012-03-20 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

2164 needs discussion, unless altering the number of significant digits in 
the ntpq output wouldn't break anything.  Do we need to have this 
discussion?  I have looked through ntpq.c, but I can't see where the 
number of decimal digits in the output for offset is set.

It seems that the types of different variables are stored in a
table, and offset has type FL. Latter on, there is a block of
code like this:

case FL:
output(fp, name,
   lfptoms(lfp, 3));
break;
case FU:
output(fp, name,
   ulfptoms(lfp, 3));
break;
case FS:
output(fp, name,
   lfptoms(lfp, 3));
break;

Here, the lfptoms()/ulfptoms() functions convert NTP's internal
fixed point format into a string. I think that the 3 is the number
of significant figures. You can change these, but it seems that
the control messages are such that they only have 3 significant
figures included in them.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Any chance of getting bugs 2164 and 1577 moving?

2012-03-20 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

Thanks, David.  Those don't seem to be in ntpq.c (at least 4.2.7p134), so 
no wonder I couldn't find them.

Ah - I'm looking at a slightly older verion (4.2.4p8), but I'd guess
there is similar code lurking.

But if the control messages are limited 
to microseconds, this problem is deeper than I first thought.  I suppose 
that's saving on bandwidth by a few bytes?

I think the sending code might be in ntp_control.c - there seem to
be a bunch of variables that are sent with a fixed precision (search
for 1e3 or 1e6). My guess is that because a bunch of variables are
often packed into a UDP packet, a decision to keep them a modest
size was probably taken.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Windows and Wi-Fi - starts well, frequency steps?

2011-12-31 Thread David Malone
r...@panix.com (Rod Dorman) writes:

I dont see anything to support the claim that UDP is treated as
guaranteed by WiFi

It says unicast frames are retransmitted - that's as close as you'll
get.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Windows and Wi-Fi - starts well, frequency steps?

2011-12-29 Thread David Malone
Dave Hart daveh...@gmail.com writes:

I recognize I'm suggesting a layer violation in wishing 802.11 devices
treated UDP differently from TCP, or even worse in terms of layer
violation, UDP 123 differently from UDP 53.  It's not pretty, but it
would make a positive difference.  The ideal number of retries for NTP
may be zero, assuming the radio layer loss rates are less than 87.5%
in practice.

All QoS choices that are made at a low layer involve some amount
of layering violation, so I don't actually find this objectionable.
If the PHY rate selection algorithm is any good, then the loss rate
will be less that 87% unless the network is really clogged up with
a lot of busy stations and there are a lot of collisions.

 An alternative would
 be to use NTP's broadcast mode on a LAN, which would eliminate
 retries.

Right.

There is one other cool thing you can do with timing and 802.11
broadcasts. Broadcasts really are broadcasts - you're not seeing
copies of a packet as you would on a switch. If you can timestamp
the arrival of a broadcast, it should provide you with a common
reference point in time between a bunch of devices. It can be
a fun way to watch the drift on the clocks on a bunch of devices.

(The 802.11 cards often have relatively good time counters on them
too, for backoff and TSF calculations. I've a version of the
Atheros driver for FreeBSD that can work as the system timecounter.
I've still to check how it compares to other hardware.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Windows and Wi-Fi - starts well, frequency steps?

2011-12-29 Thread David Malone
r...@panix.com (Rod Dorman) writes:

I did a quick scan of 802.11-2007.pdf and didn't see any requirement
that UDP is treated as guaranteed by WiFi. 

Could you give a page number or section reference?

Look for the handling of unicast traffic.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Windows and Wi-Fi - starts well, frequency steps?

2011-12-29 Thread David Malone
r...@panix.com (Rod Dorman) writes:

Isn't 802.11 a physical layer specification? Why would it be defining
transport layer behaviour?

No - it's a MAC and PHY layer. It doesn't care about TCP or UDP,
only MAC layer things like unicast and multicast, and the required
management/control glue to make it all work. Have a look at section
6.1.1.3, which notes that most unicast traffic is ACKed, but broadcast
and multicast is not. Section 9 describes a good bit of the MAC,
and 9.2.8 the ACKing procedure.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Windows and Wi-Fi - starts well, frequency steps?

2011-12-28 Thread David Malone
Danny Mayer ma...@ntp.org writes:

No you don't want to do DNS over TCP if you can avoid it. It would be a
major hit on the resolver servers and with the kind of high volume that
you get as mobile devices make increasing use of such networks. You want
WiFi to drop UDP packets if they are lost rather than attempting to
retransmit them.

\begin{ramble}

All unicast MAC layer traffic is retransmitted on WiFi if not
recieved correctly, probably for the same reason that Ethernet also
retransmits packets that collide. If NTP can handle 10base2 Ethernet,
then it should be able to handle WiFi.

The maximum number of retries depends somewhat on the hardware
(usually between 7 and 11 tries), and is subject to backoff, in a
similar way to traditional Ethernet. Determining if a packet was
successful depends on on a MAC-layer ACK, because you can't easily
do collision detection in the same way as Ethernet. The reason that
only unicast packets are retransmitted is because it's tricky to
figure out who sends the ACK if it is multicast or broadcast. I
suspect that if the 802.11 guys could figure it out, multi-/broadcast
traffic would also be retransmitted as needed.

Modern hardware that supports 802.11e (or 802.11n, which requires
much of the QoS part of 11e) can control things like the number of
retries, and you could hack the driver to inspect the packets and
if it is NTP to reduce the number of retires. An alternative would
be to use NTP's broadcast mode on a LAN, which would eliminate
retries. However, I suspect that bufferbloat and asymetric delays
on DSL is probably a much bigger problem for NTP than 802.11 retries.

\end{ramble}

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Configure FreeBSD or Linux to use stepping clock?

2011-12-17 Thread David Malone
Dave Hart h...@ntp.org writes:

I did a bit of searching but of course this is an odd request:  help
me degrade the precision of my system clock, please hasn't come up
much.  If you have any suggestions, please speak up here, or privately
if you prefer.

On FreeBSD you could try selecting the dummy timecounter.
I think this will produce a counter that steps in a rather
clunky way. Something like:

sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=dummy

should probably work. (Running sysctl kern.timecounter will
output various information about the available timecounters.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Detecting bufferbloat via ntp?

2011-02-16 Thread David Malone
Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at tmsw.no writes:

The end points needs at least bandwidth*latency buffers simply to keep 
the flow going, while routers in between should have very little buffer 
space, simply because that will allow the end points to discover the 
real channel capacity much sooner.

For traditional TCP (single flow), you need bandwidth*latency as
sockbuf at both ends plus the same at the bottleneck router. Some
of the new TCP congestion control systems can do with less, and
still fill the link if they are the only flow.

You might claim that a little intermediate buffer space is a good thing, 
in that it can allow a short-term burst of packets to get through 
without having to discard other useful stuff, but only as long as most 
links have spare capacity most of the time.

There was some work a few years ago that suggested that you needed
about bandwidth*latency/sqrt(n) buffering at a link with n bottlenecked
TCP flows, in order to make sure that the flows could actually use
the link. There was also a suggestion that you could get away with
less, but that neemed to require a quite large n in practice.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Detecting bufferbloat via ntp?

2011-02-16 Thread David Malone
Danny Mayer ma...@ntp.org writes:

 For traditional TCP (single flow), you need bandwidth*latency as
 sockbuf at both ends plus the same at the bottleneck router. Some
 of the new TCP congestion control systems can do with less, and
 still fill the link if they are the only flow.

Since NTP only uses UDP the packet handling will be different. I'm not
sure why you are talking about TCP here.

Oh - I though we'd drited onto the topic of how much buffering was
sensible in a network. The bandwidth*latency rule of thumb, which
Terje mentioned, is basically derived from the amount of buffering
required for a TCP flow to fill a link. I agree this has nothing
to do with ntp, except that NTP packets will often share a buffer
with TCP packets.

It would be more useful to discuss what happens with UDP flows since
that is what NTP uses.

For ntp, I suspect the required amount of buffering is (number of
peers)*(largest number of packets sent in burst modes), and probably
less in practice?

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Use ntpd as a daemon so that it continuously disciplines clock, no

2011-01-17 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid writes:

Have you ever measured the resources used by ntpd on a modern CPU? 
Absolutely negligible - at least when serving a dozen clients and serving 
as a stratum-1 PPS clock.  Perhaps a little more with thousands of 
clients, of course.  Not running ntpd continuously will ruin its accuracy.

Checking our server here with, probaly over 1000 clients, which
also monitors a GPS refclock, ntpd seems to have used about 0.1%
CPU over the last month on an oldish P4 box.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Timekeeping broken on Windows XP with multimedia timer enabled (-M option)

2010-01-27 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor 
david-tay...@blueyonder.delete-this-bit.and-this-part.co.uk.invalid writes:

Thanks for that.  Interesting, as it seems that you /may/ be able to get 
access to a serial I/O (needed for the GPS) according to the diagram here:

  http://www.marvell.com/platforms/Marvell_PlugComputer_DevKit.pdf

I wonder whether anyone has ported NTP to this platform, and what accuracy 
they have seen?

I believe FreeBSD has been ported to that platform:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm

Though I'm not sure of the exact status of the port. Warner would
probably know.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] NTP absolute accuracy?

2009-11-03 Thread David Malone
David Woolley da...@ex.djwhome.demon.invalid writes:

David Malone wrote:

 The Rugby unit was built by Ian Dowse, and is described here:
 
  http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/rugby.html
 

This is a simple AM detector for the slow code (I don't know if the fast 
code is still transmitted).  It doesn't phase lock onto the carrier.

Yep - It just delivers the pulses to DCD on a serial port. The
driver uses the PPS API and averages the second marks over the
minute before delivering the dates to NTP via the SHM driver.

I do have some software radio stuff that looks at various long wave
signals. Where I am, we can hear MSF, DCF, BBC 4 and TDF, all of
which carry time signals. I have some plots of the phase here:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/phase.png

You can clearly see the phase-modulated timecodes on top of BBC 4
and TDF. Josh Tobin did some work with me to write software decoders
for these over the summer, and had the TDF signal working as an NTP
refclock. We haven't cleaned the code up yet, but hope to soon.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] NTP absolute accuracy?

2009-11-02 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.not-this-bit.nor-this.co.uk.invalid 
writes:

Thanks, David, David and Jan.  A few milliseconds is what I had expected, 
so if you are on a consumer line, what implications does that have for 
unruh's comment?

I've been plotting the offset reported by ntpq -p for my Rugby
receiver and a GPS-based server over DSL at:

http://www.dwmalone.net/mrtg/ntp/

(Appologies if you're using IPv6, the link to the machine is a bit
wonkey right now.) I take a sample every 64s from the Rugby peer,
and lanczos is the other peer uses ntp's standard polling.

The Rugby unit was built by Ian Dowse, and is described here:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/rugby.html

It was calibrated to be within about 1ms of the GPS unit when they
were connected to machines on the same LAN.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] NTP absolute accuracy?

2009-10-31 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.not-this-bit.nor-this.co.uk.invalid 
writes:

Unruh  wrote in message news:34jgm.50898$ph1.36...@edtnps82...
[]
 Note that chrony will give you a factor of 2 or three improvement over
 ntp  in the errors, assuming that the roundtrip is equally split on
 Linux or BSD.

For those without wide-bandwidth academic connections - those folks on 
cable or ADSL - how good is an equal split round trip assumption?

I have a machine with Rugby reciever that also syncs (over DSL) to
a machine with a GPS unit. Based on that, it looks like the asymetry
is small (not more than a handful of ms, on a path of 32ms).

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Strange NTP problem on AMD Geode LX cards.

2009-10-03 Thread David Malone
David Hawkins david.j.hawk...@btinternet.com writes:

They are running Sues Linux from a read only flash drive, all identical 
clones other than host names and IP addresses.

Aren't there stories of recent Linux kernels miscalibrating the
kernel timer against the hardware? I guess you could check the
dmesg at boot to see what frequency it thinks the timers are
running at.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] 500ppm - is it too small?

2009-08-17 Thread David Malone
nemo_outis a...@xyz.com writes:

First, it seems somewhere between naive and disingenuous to pretend that 
ntp, despite being (quasi-)open source (It *IS* copyrighted!), does not 
have a significant political overhead from a dominant figure that has, 
for instance, inhibited such aspects as updating the RFC. 

[This is a bit off topic, but...]

Open source can be copyrighted or public domain. Public domain
software could also be non-open source, if (say) binaries were put
in the public domain without the source. Wikipedia has a long article
with the details...

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] What to do about broken IPv6 sites

2009-06-19 Thread David Malone
Steve Kostecke koste...@ntp.org writes:

 Since RFC-compliant behavior is to try the IPv6 address first, I
 have to timeout on every page element before switching to IPv4.

I have an IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric and have _no_ problems
with IPv6 to *.ntp.org

FWIW, I saw www.ntp.org not responding over IPv6 about a week ago
and (apparently) had no problems with other IPv6 sites. I was going
to report the problem, but it seemed to have fixed itself by the
time I got back to it.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] How bad is USB?

2009-05-09 Thread David Malone
David J Taylor david-tay...@blueyonder.not-this-part.nor-this.co.uk.invalid 
writes:

I know it's off-topic, but how far apart in time does two singers, or 
choir, have to be before you notice?  (No, I'm not suggesting a spoken ref 
clock  G).

If you have an small orcestra between a conductor and choir, the
choir can be a good bit behind the conductor unless they watch
rather than listen. This is probably only a matter  10m (though
I suspect the effect is not just due to the speed of sound, but
also due to the compounding of people's reaction times).

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Very rapid polling

2009-02-21 Thread David Malone
David Woolley da...@ex.djwhome.demon.co.uk.invalid writes:

Uwe Klein wrote:

 The hardware does automatic resend on collision using an
 exponential+random backoff algorithm.

Properly functioning ethernet has minimum packet lengths that guarantee 
that it one receiver sees a collision, all of them see the collision. 
Therefore collisions should never result in duplicate packets at the 
application layer.

(Though this is possible, but rare, on 802.11 if the packet
transmission is successful, but the MAC layer ACK is corrupted.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] False Reports of Leap-Seconds

2009-01-26 Thread David Malone
Unruh unruh-s...@physics.ubc.ca writes:

No I meant one in a thousand would read this post of yours and repent and
change their ways. 

Ah - sorry - I misunderstood!

Why not publish a list of the errant servers and shame them into good behaviour

I suspect that the stratum 2 and pool servers that are still
advertising leaps are doing so because they have learned about it
from an upstream server that is advertising it, so there's not much
point in nagging about it. From the stratum 1 list, I've only seen
ntp2.remco.org and ubitaneous.cpsc.ucalgary.ca advertise leap bits
in the last couple of days.

I guess that when the newer version of ntpd that takes a vote on
the forthcomming leap second is more widely deployed, then the
number of stratum 2 and pool servers advertiting leaps will be more
tame.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] False Reports of Leap-Seconds

2009-01-26 Thread David Malone
David E. Ross nob...@nowhere.not writes:

Per my earlier reply, they should be set only during the same day that
ends with a leap-second.

Note that while some of the current RFCs say current day the draft
of the NTPv4 spec at:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ntp-ntpv4-proto-11.txt

says end of the current month. I guess this is to bring the spec
inline with existing practice.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] False Reports of Leap-Seconds

2009-01-25 Thread David Malone
Unruh unruh-s...@physics.ubc.ca writes:

Since I have not (and will not) test all NTP servers, operators reading
this newsgroup should check their own servers to ensure they are not
reporting false leap-seconds.

Well, maybe you will catch 1 in a thousand of them.

I'm still monitoring a slice of them and updating the graphs at:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leap2008.html#ntpleapflag

The number of stratum 1 servers advertising the leap is almost zero
now. The number of pool and stratum 2 servers is still somewhat
higher,

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] leap_add_sec still being advertised ?

2009-01-13 Thread David Malone
Ronan Flood use...@umbral.org.uk writes:

Current ntp-stable has this comment in ntp_proto.c

 * combining algorithm. Consider each peer in turn and OR the
 * leap bits on the assumption that, if some of them honk
 * nonzero bits, they must know what they are doing. 

This has been changed in ntp-dev into a weighted vote.

Yep - that's what I had in mind, combined with the possibility of
some people having a copy of the leapseconds file installed manually
or via autokey.  Once most people are using the majority vote
version, I suspect that the number of people advertising the leap
will go down more quickly.

(The effective graph of who believes whose leap bits will also be
important - if it is ending up with cycles then the leap bits could
hang around for ever, even with the majority vote rule.)

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] leap_add_sec still being advertised ?

2009-01-12 Thread David Malone
Q @.. writes:

Is it me or are a *lot* of servers still advertising the leap from December 
? 2 examples from one of my boxes, but most of the ones in the list are 
showing leap_add_sec.

I've been graphing this since late November:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leap2008.html#ntpleapflag

the number of servers advertising the leap is gradually comming
down. I believe it shouldn't matter too much as long as it gets
to zero in the next couple of months.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] leap_add_sec still being advertised ?

2009-01-12 Thread David Malone
Unruh unruh-s...@physics.ubc.ca writes:

Well, the leap standard actually says that a leap second is possible at the
end of any month, with June/dec being prefered, AprSep being next on the
list and the rest being down there. 

Indeed - though that's not likely in the near future.

Now, ntp has code to say that only June or Dec are accepted, but that is
contrary to the standard. So, none of them should say that there is leap
second coming.

Exactly - I think this lingering-leapbits thing is a problem that
probably needs to be looked at, but it unlikely to cause many
problems in the near future. The rules for passing on leap bits
have gradually changed, and I guess what we are seeing is a mix of
different sets of rules being applied in different places.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap Second

2008-12-03 Thread David Malone
morsupil [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

It seems that since the LI flag is set on some servers, some NTP
clients problems.
Here is a problem reported by a nagios server on some ntp servers:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ntp -H xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown

The first link I see when I search for check_ntp says it is depricated.
Could it be a bug in check_ntp? Are the servers running an unusual ntp
daemon?

I also see since 3 day problems on some Set Top Box that doesn't
understand the answer from an ntpd server causing those STB hanging at
boot... The workaround solution for the moment is to shutdown
synchronisation with Public NTP server pool... too bad...

You probably need to complain to the STB vendor... Who makes them?
Any idea who did the NTP implementation?

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Bizzare half second disagreement between ntp hosts

2008-01-12 Thread David Malone
Unruh [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

not, suppose you have an assymetric roundtrip to tick.usask.ca, due to a
long downloading being done at your site. If the downloading is at your
site, you'll have the same assymetric roundtrip to all the remote
servers configured in your ntpd (and the same conditions apply for the
three servers you post).

Except there was no large download, and this situation seems to have
continued for about 30 min.

I think that the delay field would also need to be large (at least
half a second, if you saw an offset of half a second) to accomodate
this, and that wasn't the case (if I remember right).

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions


Re: [ntp:questions] Leap second bug?

2008-01-05 Thread David Malone
David L. Mills [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

The intended behavior if the servers do correctly signal a leap and the 
kernel is unaware of that, is that the step interval will be exceeded 
for about 15 minutes and then the time will be stepped. During that 
interval your clock will appear one second slow relative to the server 
that has correctly inserted a second. There will be no slew, onlly the 
step. The fact that your time showed otherwise suggests either the step 
has been disabled or something else comes unstuck. Our clocks here 
showed no such behavior as yours.

During the 2005 leap second, I did see some of our peers show an
offset of 0.5 seconds for reasons that I don't understand.  For
example, see the last graph on this page:

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/time/leap2005_peers.html

It wasn't the only example - several other peers showed an offset
of near 0.5 seconds after the leap - you can find those through the
more graphs of other peers link at the bottom of the page.

David.

___
questions mailing list
questions@lists.ntp.org
https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions