?c2go

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > I still don't understand that suggestion at all.  Would it be implementing
> > the Byzantine time=sync algorithms? If so, howe is it simple?
> 
> No.   That's what makes it simple.
> 
> > I guess I need to see something more like a functional spec for your
> > concept. It sounds like you might have something interesting in mind, but I
> > am completely failing to follow your thinking. 
> 
> Assume your local clock is good.  Use it.
> 
> All it does it answer NTP requests.  Just receive a packet, drop packets with 
> invalid fields, fill in the appropriate slots and send it back.  If there are 
> fields that can't be filled in correctly, fake something.
> 
> That should be close to a server running off a local refclock.  Maybe even 
> identical.
> 
> It gets a chance to poke in lots of interesting corners without getting 
> overly complex.  You have to do network I/O and byte swapping.  You have to 
> interface to c code.  You have to convert from Unix time to NTP time.  ...
> 
> If that's done as a hack, we can measure performance.  If it's none well, 
> with a multithreaded version, it might be appropriate for busy servers.  I'm 
> thinking of the NIST level of traffic.
> 
> It might make an interesting platform to experiment with crypto.

Thanks, that's what I needed.  That *is* an interesting idea,
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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