[ntp:hackers] Bug hunting opportunities
Todd Glassey
tglassey at earthlink.net
Thu Oct 29 23:30:48 UTC 2009
Greg Dowd wrote:
> How would this work? I expect the pll runs closed loop and not setting
> the clock would just send it to the rails and introduce all kinds of
> wacky behavior in the daemon.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hackers-bounces+gdowd=symmetricom.com at lists.ntp.org
> [mailto:hackers-bounces+gdowd=symmetricom.com at lists.ntp.org] On Behalf
> Of Hal Murray
> Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 11:36 AM
> To: Harlan Stenn
> Cc: hackers at ntp.isc.org
> Subject: Re: [ntp:hackers] Bug hunting opportunities
>
>
>
>> I would be Thrilled if somebody would get a test suite going.
>>
>
> Here is a possibly crazy thought...
>
> Suppose we added a user mode switch to the command line.
>
> The idea is to allow a as much testing as we can while the system is
> still
> running a production version of ntpd. The ntpd under test would run,
> but not
> do anything to the system.
OK. That would also allow a query without time-setting or also the use
of time-query from the local context which would be cool for cloud
(cluster based) systems.
> It could write log files and stuff in the
> user's
> directory.
>
You mean run a user-specific instance of NTP that the user process owns
rather than being operated as a shared resource? Would that also allow
the user to specify the port number as well so it could be run with a
formal copy of NTP running on the same system or virtual system instance?
> I think it's only a few lines of code in several places.
>
Yep
> One is listening on a non-standard port number.
> Another is not actually setting the time.
>
That is a "run in query mode only"
> We should probably not clutter up syslog.
>
No actually you should allow for logging aggregation there as well and
support either specifying a log per user-NTP instance or allowing
standard logging elsewise.
> Bypass the check for being root.
> Changing the default config file from /etc/ntp.conf to ./ntp.conf
> would
> reduce errors
>
Config file should be specifiable for each virtual instance. The NTP
service would sort of be a framework for NTP daemons - either shared or
private then.
> Are there any others?
>
Connection rules on a per instance basis but that's probably a given
> It might be handy if it wrote something to a log file any time it would
> have
> called the system to adjust the time. That log file might be handy for
> non-user debugging.
>
> You would have to setup a special debugging ntp.conf. It would put the
> log
> files and drift file someplace where you could write.
With the virtual instance files or the logging file if one is created.
> With a bit of
> work,
> this could even be merged into something like flock-build.
>
> I think you could even test refclocks this way if you had one that
> wasn't in
> use by the real system.
>
>
>
>
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