[ntp:hackers] Broadcast/multicast commands

Heiko Gerstung heiko.gerstung at meinberg.de
Mon Dec 17 13:33:05 UTC 2007


Danny Mayer schrieb:
> Heiko Gerstung wrote:
>   
>> David L. Mills schrieb:
>>     
>>> Danny,
>>>
>>> We are suffering a semantic oscillator here. A broadcastclient with no 
>>> arguments means listen on the broadast address of all attached IPv4 
>>> subnets. With one or more IPv4 broadcast addresses, listen only on those 
>>> addresses. With one or more IPv4 multicast addresses, listen on those 
>>> addresses, too. With one or more IPv5 addresses, listen for them, too. 
>>>  From a purely semantic point of view, a mixure of all of these is 
>>> meaningful. It is possible, maybe likely, that the present 
>>> implementation couldn't handle this without a serious fight, but the 
>>> semantics should be meaningful.
>>>   
>>>       
>> Wouldn't it be reasonable to add a "multicastclient" config option then? 
>> >From a semantic point of view I never liked to explain customers and 
>> users to "use broadcastclient to enable multicast mode".
>>
>> Suggestion:
>> a) broadcastclient without parameters -> listen to broadcast addresses 
>> of all NICs
>> b) broadcastclient with one or more parameters -> listen to specified 
>> broadcast address(es)
>> c) multicastclient without parameters -> invalid (config error)
>> d) multicastclient with one or more parameters -> listen to specified 
>> multicast address(es)
>>
>> Alternatively c) could be defined as "listen to default NTP multicast 
>> address".
>>
>>     
>
> If you go back and read this thread you would understand that Dave is
> trying to get *rid* of multicastclient. That exists today.
>
> Danny
>   
Yep, I should stay away from the keyboard before I finished my 3rd cup 
of coffee, especially on Mondays ... Sorry!

But I would like to hear from Dave why he thinks that a newbie will be 
better off with using "broadcastclient" instead of "multicastclient" for 
configuring a multicast client. As far  as I can tell a lot of users 
would like to see an additional "multicast" statement which could be a 
synonym for "broadcast" - or actually check that its arguments are 
really multicast addresses.

And I am sure that it would be not a big deal to fix that filthy secret 
code and check for the string "novolley" instead of assuming it whenever 
more than zero parameters are specified.


Best Regards,
 Heiko




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