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NTP's Fate Hinges On "Father Time"
Esther Schindler writes In April, one of the open source code movement's first and biggest success stories, the Network Time Protocol, will reach a decision point, writes Charlie Babcock. At 30 years old, will NTP continue as the preeminent time synchronization system for Macs, Windows, and Linux computers and most servers on networks? Or will this protocol go into a decline marked by drastically slowed development, fewer bug fixes, and greater security risks for the computers that use it? The question hinges to a surprising degree on the personal finances of a 59-year-old technologist in Talent, Ore., named Harlan Stenn.
according to the article he does the entire project by himself, no wonder its a mess. If this graybeard cant take on a team of young folks then we will have to wait for him to die or a fork.
I think it will be forked if there is a need to do so . I dont see the point in this article.
I have two problems with this article.
(1) $7,000/month * 12 months + additional $12,000/year = $96,000/year, not including any other contributions that come into his non-profit on top of that.
(2) Most of the need for NTP is driven by bad protocol design in client/server software.
NFS, for example, would not need synchronized time if the client would include a "this is my idea of the current time" timestamp in time related requests, e.g. "set mtime".
The server then does:
(clients idea of current time) - (clients desired mtime) + (servers idea of current time) = mtime to set on server
Voila: everything is consistent, clocks don't need synchronized between the client and the server.
Bonus points: network latency adjustment is automatic; no need to go off and implement PTP to get an even more precise version of NTP.
So most of this is a problem we've brought on ourselves by stupidly assuming a client and a server need synchronized time values in the first place, and then designing asinine protocol that build this assumption into the infrastructure built on top of those protocols.
Maybe instead of making NTP more reliable - at a pretty high expense for the small town in Oregon where he lives, and the cost of living is relatively low - we should work to get the rest of our infrastructure away from being addicted to having a synchronized time base in the first place?
PS: Yes, I brought this issue up in the IETF when NFSv4 was being designed in the first place.
SystemD will just swallow it and replace it, if not already done.
You should try to keep up. :)
He doesn't have time.
systemd will perform the functionality at some point.
"A corp is an abstract non-human entity"
I know of 9 judges who would tell you otherwise.