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"Father Time" Gets Another Year At NTP From Linux Foundation
dkatana writes: Harlan Stenn, Father Time to some and beleaguered maintainer of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to others, will stay working for the NTP another year. But there is concern that support will decline as more people believe that NTP works just fine and doesn't need any supervision. NTP is the preeminent time synchronization system for Macs, Windows, and Linux computers and most servers on networks. According to IW, for the last three-and-a-half years, Stenn said he's worked 100-plus hours a week answering emails, accepting patches, rewriting patches to work across multiple operating systems, piecing together new releases, and administering the NTP mailing list. If NTP should get hacked or for some reason stop functioning, hundreds of thousands of systems would feel the consequences. "If that happened, all the critics would say, 'See, you can't trust open source code,'" said Stenn.
Well, for starters, its not always drop-in compatible with existing clients and servers in the wild, and it lacks the necessary precision for doing any sort of work that that requires sub-second synchronization accuracy.
I'm assuming the 'BSD NTP client' is OpenNTPd. The 'Linux NTP client' is NTPd that we all know and is not linux specific.
Primary differences between the two:
OpenNTPd just cares about getting the local clock close to the remote NTP's supplied time. Nothing more.
NTPd wants to get the local clock as closely as possible to actual time as well as disciplining the local timesource such that 1 second is accurately 1 second, while weeding out faulty or maliciously bad sources of time. It also can act as a server, or as a peer in a server group. It can also directly interact with multiple reference clocks.
In short, you're comparing a simple client that just looks at the time on the wall vs something that's trying to be accurate and can act as the server side of the equation.
OpenNTPd added the ability to tweak the kernel tick rate to reduce skew. It can now keep your clock within 10 milliseconds between syncs. Still not as good as the official NTP.
Not particularly highlighted in the article is that the LF CII is funding a small team of developers with NTP experience to focus on security hardening, development process modernization, and opening the community. There is concern about the bus factor and an attempt is being made to address it.
No critical infrastructure project should ever be so dependent on a single developer.
I don't keep up with Harlan's schedule these days, but I worked with him briefly back when he was at Netflix. At the time, he didn't strike me as much of a braggart or prone to exaggeration. And his work ethic was ... not high on work/life balance.
I wouldn't bet against him working that hard on NTP -- I've never before met anyone who loved a protocol as much as Harlan loves NTP :)
The Chrony comparison page compares ntpd, Chrony and OpenNTPd. Another yet to be finished alternative is ntimed (which seems to currently be around 6000 LoC). On some Linux's if you don't care about accuracy or trying to weed out false time you can always use an client such as systemd-timedated.