[ntpwg] NTPv4 MIB Revised Version 1.2

[Heiko Gerstung]

Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 8:30 AM +0100 2006-01-27, Heiko Gerstung wrote:
> 
>>  You are free to choose what monitoring scheme suits you. I know a lot
>>  of people who would have no problems with monitoring a range-limited
>>  data object and, if this one exceeds a limit (far away from the maximum
>>  of 2147 seconds) have a look at the full range object or use ntpq or
>>  another mode 6 tool to investigate what's wrong.
> 
>     They might intend to do that, but I think we both know that won't 
> happen in most cases where something goes wrong.  The failures will be 
> rare and subtle enough that the people who originally put the system 
> together are long gone and they didn't do a complete job at the time, 
> and the people who come after them don't know what's missing.
> 
>     IMO, that's just asking for trouble.  There's this legal concept of 
> an "attractive nuisance", for which you can be held liable in criminal 
> and civil court.  I don't think we want to go down that road.
> 
>>  Mode-6 protocol is simply not interesting for most network 
>> administrators
>>  in the real world, because it is just another monitoring protocol and
>>  because their servers, printers, switches, routers and coffee machines
>>  (that is the real critical point of failure, believe me) speak SNMP and
>>  they just do not want to add a different monitoring style for a couple
>>  of NTP servers to their management console.
> 
>     People need to understand what's behind the data they're getting, 
> and they need to be made aware of any shortcomings in what they're 
> seeing versus the real data from which their numbers are supposedly 
> derived.  If they don't, then you've got a real disaster on your hands 
> when things go "Tango Uniform".
> 
>     So long as you keep only one representation of the data in the 
> official standard, and that representation is capable of handling the 
> range and accuracy of the data to be represented, then any failures in 
> the presentation of this data to the user are not your fault, and you 
> cannot be held liable in criminal or civil court.
> 

Brad,

I really do not think that anyone can be sued if there is a definition 
of a data object with a description that says "this data object is 
limited to representing a range of -2147 to +2147 seconds" .. but, I 
already surrendered :-) and will include such a data object in our 
private MIB. Maybe I just provide our customers with a data object in 
our private MIB like mbgNtpCurrentOffsetMs (INTEGER, current NTP offset 
in milisecond resolution).

I think that we are safe as long as we clearly describe and explain what 
the data objects represent. And, I never heard of any editor of an RFC 
standard that was sued because of logical errors in the standard. I am 
not a lawyer (and I do not want to be one...), but I think that you are 
spreading FUD here :-)

Kind regards,
Heiko


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