I ran some tests last night to get a baseline as to how the Touch currently behaves.
I put together a system with a Touch, vortexbox and a laptop, all hardwired to a switch without an internet connection. I put static IPs on everything. With the Touch looking at the vortexbox the Touch will sync to the vortexbox time at boot, and occasionally after that. I changed the time on the vortexbox, the Touch did not immediately update its time but it did update sometime over night. I'm not exactly sure when or what the period was. But sometime between 1am and 7am the Touch synced up to the vortexbox. I tried the Touch runny TinySBS, it did NOT get time from the vortexbox unless I switched to the vortexbox SBS, at which point it updated immediately. I tried without the vortexbox connected, running off TinySBS. The time in this situation on the Touch is random. The time CAN be set with the date command via SSH. If I add an internet connection the Touch will connect to MySB at boot time and get time from it. It does NOT seem to make periodic checks with MySB, thus the drift over long times. You CAN update via MySB by explicetly connecting to mysqueezebox.com (settings->advanced->networking->connect to mysqueezebox.com). This WILL immediately set the time on the Touch. The Touch does have msntp but it doesn't look like its being used. I'm not up on msntp so I'm not sure if it can be used to connect to a server and keep a drift file. So what needs to be done to make things better? It seems that when running TinySBS and an internet connection is available the Touch should be updating its system time from an externat time server at least once a day. Since MySB is also an ntp server there should be no need to actually connect to the MySB SBS as a library, but just connect to the ntp server to get to the time. This should be completely transparent. In the situation where there is NO internet connection there should be a GUI to set the time manually, and it would be really nice if this could be used to train a drift file, so that after a few manual updates the drift file technique could keep the time accurate over long periods of time. Where things get dicey is if you ARE connected to an external server AND the internet. The approach in this case seems to be that the server you are connected to takes precedence over an internet time server. If this is kept it seems like the Touch then needs to change where it syncs to depending on what type of server its connected to. If its connected to an external SBS (but not MySB) it uses the external SBS and does NOT get time from an ntp server. IF its connected to TinySBS, it ignores the time from that SBS and gets it from an ntp server (maybe MySB). So what happens if you switch back and forth? How about this as an algorithm: Every hour update the time, if currently connected to an SBS that is not running on its own hardware, get the the time from the SBS. If connected to TinySBS on its own hardware try and connect to an ntp server. If not connected to ANY SBS try and connect to an ntp server. If we use this, do we maintain a drift file and what do we update it from? It seems that sometimes updating from an ntp server and sometimes from an SBS which gets its time from some machine which may not be synched to an ntp server could be very bad. Do we ignore external SBS time and just use ntp server and keep drift file and live with the fact that Touch time might be different from server time? Does the user have to choose which scheme they want to use based on their primary usage (primarily external SBS or primarily TinySBS)? I think there are a fair amount of subtleties as to how the system should work that need to get hammered out before implementations are put into place. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=79894 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
