New blog draft on the TESTFRAME debacle

[Hal Murray]

I don't understand your section about the PLL.  I think it's tangled up in 
some bogus terminology.  If you say a bit more, I'll try to sort things out.

What OSes are the odd-balls?  What makes them odd?  Is this just a different 
API to the kernel that turns into significantly different paths through ntpd?

Are there other examples in this area?  If not, I think it would be valuable 
to be able to run TESTFRAME using only the logs that were captured on a 
compatible system.

Plan B would be to do something like cross compile using header files that 
match the system the log file was captured on.  In replay mode, there is no 
interaction with the kernel so we don't actually need the library/kernel 
calls that don't exist on the replay system.  We would probably have to error 
out the real calls in the intercept module.  That doesn't seem like a hard 
problem.


> Every leap-second insertion requires us to rebuild some check files. 

Is that for gpsd or ntpd?


I'd like a few more examples of free parameters.

> Here are some changes we've already made in NTPsec that break replay: the
> default poll interval, the allowable minima and maxima the protocol machine
> hunts in, and the default of minsane.  In effect, the entire logic of the
> sync algorithms is a gigantic free parameter with 

What did we change in the way of the default poll interval?  or minsane?

I think we changed the allowable minpoll, but that doesn't change anything 
unless you use it and old test logs won't have used it.

I did one round of minsane cleanups.  I only added a warning message 
suggesting you add a line to your ntp.conf.  That would add a few logging 
messages at startup, but otherwise not change any run time operations. We 
should be able to provide a way to mark the new behavior as OK and fixup the 
recorded log file so it works clean next time.

Even if we did change something like the default poll interval, we should be 
able to patch old config files used for a TESTFRAME run to restore the old 
default.

-- 
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