[ntp:questions] Thoughts on KOD

Jason Rabel jason at extremeoverclocking.com
Mon Jul 7 20:31:38 UTC 2014


> Would it be useful to offer an "official" minimal implementation
> intended for embedded systems so that these people won't feel the need
> to code their own?  Maybe add minimal NTP support to Busybox?

Actually, Busybox does have a ntp daemon... Where the code comes from I do not know. I've tried running it on a couple
residential-grade routers and to be honest it runs like crap. Running it as a server (in theory to re-distribute time to your lan)
is even worse and basically useless and a waste of resources. I can't really say if it is the hardware or software that is the
problem because I never bothered to try and diagnose it any deeper. 

It's been a while since I've looked over any ntp-like code in some of the open source router projects. Most are more concerned with
other features than getting the router's clock to nanosecond precision. Like I said before, most are just some hack of ntpdate to
get the time and run as a cron job every few hours.

I think if the NTP people wanted to help mitigate what most of the headaches & issues are out on the net, they would work with the
big networking companies to ensure their code is compliant with what is acceptable communications & error handling. One small
mistake in their code has serious repercussions when they churn out these devices by the tens of thousands (or more) before catching
their error...



More information about the questions mailing list