Pivoting

Eric S. Raymond esr at thyrsus.com
Mon Apr 24 00:00:33 UTC 2017


Gary E. Miller <gem at rellim.com>:
> Yo Eric!
> 
> On Sun, 23 Apr 2017 17:44:20 -0400
> "Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:
> 
> > Achim Gratz <Stromeko at Nexgo.DE>:
> > > I don't think ntpd needs to do any pivoting _except_ at startup
> > > time, where it is unavoidable and it should attempt to do anything
> > > after it has started up.  
> > 
> > Huh?  Potentially you need to apply a pivot to every packet that
> > comes in; different sources could even have different epochs. 
> 
> Not really.  2s complement fixes it for packet up to many years
> apart.  Remember, all ntpd uses, after the first time, is time deltas.

I don't understand this remark.  We're being shipped timestamps from
upstream, not merely deltas.

> > Instead of trying to use this for precise time, we could try using a
> > Date just at startup to figure out what era we are in.
> 
> Except for ntpd that is not net connected.  A more common condition
> than I would have thought.

I want to make that case work better too.  Doesn't mean this couldn't be useful
to a normal client-only setup.
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