[ntp:questions] NTPv4 Peer Event Codes - secret decoder ring sought
Joseph Gwinn
joegwinn at comcast.net
Wed Mar 17 03:30:53 UTC 2010
Well, we just brought NTPv4 up on some IBM AIX 5.3 machines. Had to compile
from source code on the target machines to get a daemon that didn't crash upon
launch. Anyway, the daemon appears to be happily working, and is happily
generating loopstats and peerstats files. So far so good.
The peerstats files contain a "Peer Status Word" field. NTPv4 is documented in
<http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/index.html>, and NTPv4 peerstats
files are documented in <http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/monopt.html>.
The note under the table defining peerstats record fields reads "The status
field is encoded in hex format as described in Appendix B of the NTP
specification RFC 1305". (The draft RFC for NTPv4 is innocent of all such
status information.)
Looking in section B.2.2 of RFC 1305 yields that the Peer Status Field has four
subfields, the last (rightmost) one of which being the 4-bit Peer Event Code
(page 57), which is defined for values between 0 and 5, and is "reserved" for
values 6 to 15.
Well, I have been seeing two values of Peer Status, 9614 and 963a, both
hexidecimal. I understand 9614, but 963A is a mystery, as it implies a Peer
Event Code of 10 (the "A" in the rightmost digit), which is undefined and
reserved in RFC 1305.
I would guess that NTPv4 has used some of the codes that were held in reserve in
NTPv4, but where are these new codes formally defined? This is most likely a
general question, and I would hazard that this isn't the only place where NTPv4
has outrun its documentation.
Thanks,
Joe Gwinn
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