Re: [Ntp] Antw: Re: Antw: [EXT] NTPv5 Loop Detection without Stratum

[Hal Murray <[e-mail]>]

[e-mail] said:
> SNTP is defined in RFC5905 Section 14. You don't need anything more than
> that. 

There is also RFC 4330 and a lot of crappy code out there in firmware that 
will never get updated.

RFC 5905 is over 100 pages.  Section 14 is less than a page.  How many of 
those other pages would somebody have to read and understand in order to 
implement a SNTP client?

If you were a junior programmer assigned to implement a SNTP client, would you 
go throgh RFC 5905 or google around and find some code to copy and ship it 
when it worked?


I think we should have a separate document for SNTP clients.  So far, I 
haven't convinced (m)any other people.  There are two goals:

One is to have a clear and simple document so we can point people at it when 
their current code is sending ancient format packets.  Some of those ancient 
packets are not using a format described in any RFC and they worked just 
because of the undocumented details in the ntpd implementation.

Another is to make us think and document a packet format that we will support for a long time.

We should setup servers that don't support old format packets so SNTP implementors can test their code.



-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.