[ntp:questions] Re: Why ntpd is losing out to openntp at OpenBSD (was: Windows - Seven Days Later)

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:55 PM +0000 2004-10-14, Garrett Wollman wrote:

>  1) SNTP is sufficient for most end systems' requirements.

	Properly implemented, that might be true.  IMO, OpenNTPd is not a 
proper implementation of SNTP.  If you want that, consider msntp 
instead.

>  2) The security posture of UDel's code base makes many people
>  uncomfortable.

	In what way?  The fact that we actually support authentication?

>  2a) UDel's code base is very large and results in great deal of
>  repo churn every time a new version is imported.

	We're trying to incorporate improvements from a wide variety of 
sources to a wide variety of places in the codebase, and to do so as 
quickly as we reasonably can in a volunteer project.  If you would 
prefer that we do less, we can fire most of the volunteers and make 
sure that there are relatively few code changes that get made.

>  3) Deprecation of ntpdate has angered many users.

	This is little more than an education problem.  We never should 
have allowed ntpdate to be modified in all the multitudinous ways it 
was, and we should have incorporated the necessary features into ntpd 
instead.  Almost all the features required are now incorporated into 
ntpd, and if people continue to gripe you could set up a hard link 
for the program name "ntpdate".

>  4) Difficulty of keeping manual pages up-to-date with changes in UDel
>  documentation.

	We're working on that.  Now that the public support services have 
been moved to ISC, that may be easier to keep in sync.

>  That said, there seems to be a consensus that openntpd is
>  insufficiently mature to take over at this time.  You are invited to
>  look at the FreeBSD mailing-list archives for a more detailed
>  discussion.

	I've been on the FreeBSD mailing lists for several years.  I have 
yet to see a single extensive discussion of NTP or ntpd on those 
lists.  If I've missed some extensive discussion of NTP or ntpd, 
please let me know which lists those have been on.

	If you want to seriously consider OpenNTPd, then I would 
encourage you to look at 
<http://bradknowles.typepad.com/considered_harmful/2004/09/openntpd.html> 
and make sure that you have answered in your own mind how you're 
going to deal with all these problems.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.