[ntp:hackers] Orphans sanctuary

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Thu Oct 6 19:00:09 PDT 2005


Guys,

I did a little work on the orphans and found foster care. The thing 
worked gangbusters in a broadast/broadcastclient configuration so I 
tried it in other modes and with a few changes now works in all modes. 
If no outside sources are available and the tos orphan 5 command is in 
the configuration, then any combination of servers and clients will wind 
up at stratum 5 and resololve the pecking order by the lowest root delay 
statistic.

1. If a source is available at a stratum less than 5, operation is normal.

2. If no source is available the stratum is forced to 5 and the root 
delay to zero and the reference ID to 127.0.0.1. I thought that was 
appropriate.

3. If multiple sources are available at stratum 5, the client selects 
the lowest orphan root delay (new system variable).

Note that the orphan root delay is set at startup to a random value less 
than one second. Since the distance computation uses one-half this 
value, the distance should not normally exceed the distance threshold of 
one second. However, it might if the stratum path is long.

For Harlan, the current stuff in backroom/ntp-dev is stable.

Dave


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