[ntp:questions] Re: W2003 Server SP2 Problems with W32TM

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.isc.org
Thu Oct 12 03:02:19 UTC 2006


Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> Danny Mayer wrote:
> 
>> Heiko Gerstung wrote:
>>
>>> Danny Mayer schrieb:
>>>
>>>> Eugen COCA wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I've tested a W2k3 box time synchronization by setting the server
>>>>> using
>>>>> the command line:
>>>>>
>>>>> net time /setsntp:time.usv.ro
>>>>> net stop w32time
>>>>> net start w32time
>>>>
>>>> The fact that you had to stop and start the service indicates how badly
>>>> the net time interface was written. It doesn't take much to write code
>>>> update information in the registry and then notify the service to go
>>>> reread it and act accordingly.
>>>
>>> Is this possible with ntpd? I mean, applying changes to ntp.conf and
>>> then tell the daemon/service to re-read its configuration file? I would
>>> really love to see such a feature ... :-)
>>>
>>
>>
>> It's much harder to do with ntpd. Writing and reading registry bits is
>> easy. ntpd has to deal with a lot of different platforms, but yes it is
>> one of the things we would like to implement.
>>
>>
> <snip>
> 
> It could be fone for the Unix/Linux platforms.  Send SIGHUP to the
> daemon, the daemon catches the signal, rereads the configuration file
> and starts making changes!

Absolutely not. We don't want to do interrupts. That's the old Unixy way
of doing things and it's really not the right thing to do. The proper
thing to do is to write a proper interface (like we have with ntpdc) and
write commands to the server, suitably securely. This allows a lot more
flexibility to issue commands, get respones and be able to do it
remotely. TCP port 123 is reserved for NTP and we can take advantage of
it. This should work similarly to the way that BIND 9's rndc works today
and we could in fact probably use much of the code from it.

  Other platforms may not have an equivalent
> mechanism.  I don't think Windows does and I'm pretty sure that VMS does
> not have a standard mechanism for this either.
> 

You want the same mechanism on all platforms. Anything else is madness.

Danny

> OTOH, you can use ntpdc to make changes on the fly. . . .



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