On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, Guillaume Filion wrote: > There doesn't seem to be a lot of activity from the people at ISC to > make changes to ntpd to make it more pool friendly. I've been thinking > for a while about making a patch for ntpd to do this. Linux distros > could include our patch in their packages so a good proportion of the > user base would be running this version in a couple months. > > I'll post to timekeepers-dev with more details. >
Excellente suggestion ! Would you just patch ntp so it quits trying to connect to an ntp server after so many attempts or time period ? If so, what would be the numbers for that parameter ? Then again, a down server might come back up at anytime, so obviously ntpd as a client could stop trying to connect to the servers too soon. What would ntp do when one server goes down? In the long run, it will need to reconfigure a new one to replace it. So here is a suggestion for the patch : 1) ntpd stops trying to connect to a server after so many attempts or a given time period ( a time period could be better ) 2) change ntpd configuration so we can add 'spare' servers that would not be used when ntpd first starts up. ntpd would only start connecting to the spare servers once one of its 'main' server would stop responding. 3) ntpd would use spare servers to replace main servers. 4) ntpd could also verify if one of its main server as come back on line say, once every week and failback to it. My main concern is that knowing that a server can be taken off from the configuration, users of ntpd will be tempted to put many servers in their ntp.conf file and that this will generate more useless ntp traffic. This is why I introduce the concept of 'spare servers' to solve this. Of course, you could implement a more pool specific solution ( just doing a new DNS lookup at the pool when one server goes down ) but I would be in favor of a more generic solution ( active and spare ntpd server in the config ) Maybe there is a simpler solution so let us know what you plan to do. actives and spares is a well known concept although. -Louis > Cheers, > GFK's > -- > Guillaume Filion, ing. jr > PGP Key and more: http://guillaume.filion.org/ > > Louis _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
