[ntp:questions] Thunderbolt problem

Jeff Woolsey jlw at jlw.com
Fri Sep 26 06:42:03 UTC 2014


I have a Trimble Thunderbolt that I might as well use on the machine I'm 
building near it.

It's running OpenIndiana Hipster, which came with ntp-4.2.7p453, 
apparently built with DEBUG.  I'm using the Palisade driver, with 
appropriate tweaks for the TBolt.   The relevant part of ntp.conf:

server 127.127.29.0 mode 2 minpoll 4 maxpoll 5  # Trimble Thunderbolt (PALISADE)
fudge 127.127.29.0 flag2 1 stratum 8

It's fudged to stratum 8 because NTP finds it about 30ms off from the 
rest of the world (and it's an 8-channel GPS :-).  This problem should 
go away if I ever get PPS working here.  However, while trussing it, 
looking for any evidence of PPS activity, I saw it try to issue once per 
second the message in the following code to fd#1, which wasn't attached 
to anything because ntp was a daemon here.

         // && intended, but & also works -jlw
         if ((up->type != CLK_THUNDERBOLT) & (up->type != CLK_ACUTIME)){
                 if ((up->rpt_buf[0] == (char) 0x41) ||
                     (up->rpt_buf[0] == (char) 0x46) ||
                     (up->rpt_buf[0] == (char) 0x54) ||
                     (up->rpt_buf[0] == (char) 0x4B) ||
                     (up->rpt_buf[0] == (char) 0x6D)) {

                         /* standard time packet - GPS time and GPS week number */
#ifdef DEBUG
                         printf("Palisade Port B packets detected. Connect to Port A\n");
#endif

                         return 0;
                 }
         }


This starts at about line 462 in refclock_palisade.c .  The comment is 
in my local version because I was trying something else months ago and 
just noted that.

So, would the suggested change make a difference?  (A Thunderbolt only 
has one serial port, so there is no distinction between port A and port B.)

-- 
Jeff Woolsey {woolsey,jlw}@{jlw,jxh}.com first.last@{gmail,jlw}.com
Spum bad keming.
Nature abhors a straight antenna, a clean lens, and unused storage capacity.
"Delete! Delete! OK!" -Dr. Bronner on disk space management
"Card sorting, Joel." -me, re Solitaire



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