Let's get moving on NTS

[Hal Murray]

Ian said:
> Bravo to Alpha isn't even mentioned in the draft: it speaks as though the
> two are the same client program. 

Right.  That's the whole point of Eric writing things down.  We need to define 
what happens there.

We could package Alpha and Bravo in the same program.  Similarly, we could put 
Charlie and Delta in the same program.

But ntpd is single threaded and the NTS stuff may take a while so we have to 
split it out somehow.  I'm expecting the client end to be something like the 
current DNS - a separate thread does things that may block.

I haven't looked at the NTS code.  I was thinking that separate programs 
communicating to NTP via pipe/whatever would be the most convenient way to 
maintain the code.  That may be convenient for developers but adds a level of 
complexity to admins so we should add packaging them together to our task list.

Running as separated programs connected via TCP lets us use wireshark for 
debugging.  Debug via printf (aka msyslog) may be more convenient.

Even if we package them together, I think it's appropriate to think of them as 
separate boxes.  The NTP level communication for NTS isn't very complicated 
but the TLS stuff is ballpark as complicated as DNS.  We want to use a library.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.