Eric S Raymond releases hardened, slimmer NTP beta Dogged developer and open source champion Eric S Raymond has announced a beta of a refined version of the network time protocol code as open source following financial backing. Raymond (@esrtweet) has been plugging away at a more secure and cleaner version of NTP part time, as "architecture and protocols guru" on the NTPsec …
I wonder if he was aware of OpenNTP
Maybe it's just me, but that's the sort of question I would expect a real journalist to ask. I've sent an email to the project, let's see what comes back. As for Ntimed, that project hasn't seen an update for quite some time.
I'm glad someone is looking after NTP - it's one of the more critical components of any decent platform.
OpenNTP is great for keeping a rough time of day on your computer, however it's not meant to be more precise than 50 milliseconds. It apparently doesn't even compensate for drift.
Also OpenNTP doesn't allow you to have hardware time sources, so you cannot use it for time servers. It's just meant for the 90% of people who can tolerate having a clock that's 50 milliseconds off. The rest of the people still had to use ntpd with all of its security holes.
Particularly the ability to compensate for drift is getting more and more important. It allows you to synchronize systems via IP. That way you can make things like small scale DAB transmitters running on Raspberry PIs or even rented virtual servers on the Internet. Since all the clocks of all devices run at the same rate, you will never have buffer over- or underruns.
"Since all the clocks of all devices run at the same rate, you will never have buffer over- or underruns."
Only if you don't run NTP and don't communicate with other systems cryptologically. Time can and will drift, resulting in things like SSL breaking when other systems have a far different time than the server time is.
Perhaps the hideous python thing refers to gyp. Many C++ projects use gyp or cmake to produce their makefiles these days. They're kind of like meta makefiles - the input describes the project source code, flags etc. and then the tool is run with a target platform to spew out the appropriate makefiles. It means someone can generate Visual Studio projects, or gnu make, or Ninja scripts from a single description.
Personally I prefer cmake but the both it and gyp do more or less the same thing.
Knowing Eric S Raymond, if you'd asked me what I thought he'd been developing recently, I'd have assumed it was something like a way to shoot people in the face over the Internet. :-)
"Knowing Eric S Raymond, if you'd asked me what I thought he'd been developing recently, I'd have assumed it was something like a way to shoot people in the face over the Internet. :-)"
Having been in his house before Y2K, I'd not be surprised if he was also trying to develop that.
The man had an umbrella stand full of 12 gauge shotguns.
Hi!
I am the Project Manager of the NTPsec Project.
Darren Pauli, his editors at the Register, and the readers of the Register are invited to read our website, especially the "Press and Media Resources" page. I know that you are aware of it, because you linked to it. Darren, the editors and factcheckers at the Register, and the readers of this article are invited to ask me questions about NTPsec.
Eric's blog post was not the announcement, nor did he "release" it. I announced it, and I released it. Eric is part of a team effort, a fact that he constantly and honestly says in his blog posts about the project.
Yes, we are aware of OpenNTP, and yes we are aware of Chrony, and yes we are aware of NtimeD. NtimeD is also a CII funded project, and we on the NTPsec project look forward to running interop tests with NtimeD when it's time for doing so.
Thank you for your attention.
Mark Atwood
Project Manager pro-tem
NTPsec Project
Excellent, thank you reaching out and giving us a heads up.
Even more importantly, thanks for taking care of NTP. Few people appreciate just how important accurate time keeping is on a system, and even fewer realise that there is a whole slew of easily accessible infrastructure out there that can help, so thanks.
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