Re: [Ntp] Is one refid enough

Heiko Gerstung <heiko.gerstung@meinberg.de> Thu, 05 September 2019 10:52 UTC

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Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2019 12:52:00 +0200
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Thread-Topic: [Ntp] Is one refid enough
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From: Heiko Gerstung <heiko.gerstung@meinberg.de>
To: Watson Ladd <watsonbladd@gmail.com>, NTP WG <ntp@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [Ntp] Is one refid enough
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Hi Watson,


> On 05.09.19, 06:54 "ntp im Auftrag von Watson Ladd" <ntp-bounces@ietf.org
> im Auftrag von watsonbladd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> On thinking about some of the discussion that emerged that came
> from refids I've come to the conclusion that some of the uses people
> are imagining for a complete chain aren't actually going to work,
> and we might not even need any refid. Note that my experience in this
> area is minimal: this should be more a suggestion of conversation then
> taken extremely definitively.
> 
> The first use put forward was for redundancy: one would gather
> intermediate sources until enough root sources were gathered.
> But this isn't actually a reflection of the reliability: the NTP environment
> is a graph, and the stratum 1 sources are the roots of a dynamically
> created spanning tree. In particular if we have two stratum 1
> sources A and B, and two intermediates C and D, then if both C and D
> are using both A and B then there is full redundency, even if both have
> better connectivity and thus use A to synchronize with.

The InstanceID idea would help if a client is configured to use multiple sources and wants to avoid all of them getting their time from GPS (maybe over several stratum levels), if other sources like Galileo or Glonass etc. are available as well. Think about a client resolving 4 pool servers and asking all of them where their time originally comes from. If all of them lead back to the same source (GPS), the client can decide to resolve more pool servers in order to find a set of 4 servers that offers some diversity. Or, it detects that in the original set of resolved IP addresses, two get their time from the same stratum 1 server, allowing the client to discard one of them and find another in the pool that gets its time from a different upstream source.

> The second use was for preventing loop formation: by excluding
> a source that has synchronized to you, this prevents loops. Let's
> take a simple example: A and B are two stratum 1 sources, C and D take
> from A and B respectively, and are peered. 
> Because A is so much more stable C synchronizes to it, and D synchronizes to C. Now assume that
> A goes down. What should eventually result is C synchronizing with D
> and D synchronizing to B. The question of which mechanism between using
> reference IDs and accumulating errors/stratum will work better
> is not obvious: it seems to me that not using reference IDs works just
> fine in this example and provides faster recovery: C can synchronize
> to D immediately as it is the best surviving timesource, and the error
> accumulation eventually means D prefers B (in practice quite
> quickly) vs. waiting for C to drift enough for D to switch before synchronizing
> to D.

Peering is a thing that I do not see being used very often with our customers. I did not consider peering in my thoughts about the "chain" so far, because I typically see more or less tree-like sync hierarchies. 

> As I mentioned above I'm not that experienced in this part of NTP and
> would appreciate any corrections on matters I may have misunderstood.

I would expect that a loop in NTP is typically prevented by the stratum level mechanism, if you never accept an upstream server having the same or a higher stratum level than yours, you should not be able to create a loop anyway. I therefore would accept that the refID itself is not required to prevent sync loops, no matter of which degree.

if A Is stratum 1 and A->B->C->D then B would never choose D because it is stratum 4 and B itself is stratum 2. 

Having a chain of unique InstanceIDs would still be useful because of the first use case. It would also help to find out if two servers A and B are actually the same device with two IP addresses and maybe even network connections. 

> Sincerely,
> Watson Ladd

Best Regards. 
   Heiko



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