First round of my stupid questions about NTS

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> > I want to put arrows on the flow diagram.
> 
> Data flows both way over most connections.  You probably want the arrow to 
> mean who initiates the connection rather than which way data flows.

My last revision said:

In this diagram, an arrow means "initiates requests to". 
Responses may flow in the other direction.

> The NTP-server to NTS-KE-server is complicated.  Gary has proposed no 
> connection, start with the shared key in a file and keep the keys in sync by 
> running the same update on both ends.  I think that could be made to work, but 
> I'd prefer a connection. [...and more]

I read several more replies; it appears you and Gary are working your
way towards a design we can use.  Please continue that process and
edit it into nts.adoc.  I will keep asking stupid questions.

Besides that connection, we seem to have cookie formats as an unresolved
issue because the RFC doesn't specify them.

> > Delta will need an IANA public port assignment.
> 
> The NTP port is assigned and unused for TCP.  I've been assuming that we will 
> use that until somebody says otherwise.

OK.  The fact that the KE protocol has an extension-field structure we can
use in the future to multiplex in other connection-oriented NTP services
makes me happy with this plan. I would dislike bogarting that port number.

> > I'm leaning towards an organization in which the NTS client code lives inside
> > ntpd; this would reduce deployment friction slightly.  Is there any scenario
> > in which we'd want to run these pieces on different hosts? 
> 
> Seems reasonable.  It might be nice to have them as separate programs until we 
> get things going.

I share that tropism.  On the other hand, the complexity estimator in my
head thinks the client-side code may turn out to be so light that the
complexity of the IPC would make splitting it out a net loss. Thus I
don't want to get too attached to either alternative yet.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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