[ntp:questions] Significance of "space" in the ntpq -p display

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.org
Sat Mar 14 20:11:22 UTC 2009


Dave Hart wrote:
> On Mar 12, 8:28 pm, "David J Taylor" <david-tay... at blueyonder.neither-
> this-bit.nor-this.co.uk> wrote:
>> Dave Hart wrote:
>>> On Mar 12, 8:12 pm, "David J Taylor" <david-tay... at blueyonder.neither-
>>> this-bit.nor-this.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> Dave Hart wrote:
>>>>> It looks like you've found a documentation omission.
>>>> Thanks, Dave. As you have the code to hand, could you report it as a
>>>> bug?
>>> Sure.  Where did you find the slightly inadequate description of space
>>> in the first character of the peers billboard lines?
>> The only table I can find on the official site is:
>>
>>  http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/decode.html
>>
>> where the description is: "discarded as not valid (TEST10-TEST13)"
> 
> Does it also have a more detailed description of TEST12?
> 

The test codes are really internal to the reference implementation and
they have changed from time to time so you should not rely too much on
documentation. They are mostly sanity checks to validate the incoming
packets.

> I believe the reference NTP source does not include man pages, so I
> don't think a http://bugs.ntp.org/ report would be useful.  You might
> check http://support.ntp.org/ to see if there's something you can add
> or correct there about peers billboard sync codes.

Since the test flags are version dependent there's not a lot you can do
in the way of documentation unless you include version information as well.

> However, both sites are currently inaccessible to me, which I reported
> to webmaster at ntp.org but that mail may be hosted on the same
> unreachable machine.  From three test locations I reach an ISC router
> responding host unreachable which I think means the connectivity is
> fine but the host isn't.  I'll forward the report on to a few selected
> non- at ntp.org email addresses.
> 

The site was down for maintenance.

Danny

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