NTS doesn't work with 1.1.8 shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

[Richard Laager]

For clarity, the upcoming 22.04 LTS release has this fixed, as do the 
currently-supported non-LTS releases. The ntpsec in 18.04 LTS does not 
support NTS at all. So it's only 20.04 that is a problem.

I've been aware this is a problem, but literally nobody has complained 
to me, so I haven't bothered to do anything about it. For work, I 
backport NTPsec myself into our PPA (note: it has other unrelated 
packages!):

https://launchpad.net/~wiktel/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+packages?field.name_filter=ntpsec&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=

I'll try to file an SRU [1] request for the NTS label thing. Since this 
is in universe, it's not going to be a high priority for them. 
Additionally, it's a backwards incompatible change, so that's 
problematic. I think I'll leave the port number thing alone, as that can 
be addressed in the config file, as you noted.

Is anyone here a paying customer? If so, once I file the public bug, you 
could file a case under your support contract, which will motivate them 
a lot more. I am a paying customer, but that might be a bad look for it 
to come from me.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

On 4/7/22 12:39, Hal Murray via devel wrote:
> Ubuntu ships 1.1.8 with 20.04 LTS.  NTS doesn't quite work.
> 
> 1.1.8 was released before the RFC came out.  There were a couple of late
> changes.  The port number we can fix in the config file.  There was an
> incompatable change to the string used to make keys.  There is no easy fix for
> that.
> 
> We could hack our NTS-KE server to also listen on another port and use the old
> string on that port.  Aside from being an ugly hack, it only works for our
> servers.  (and nts.ntp.se which already does something like that)
> 
> Can anybody give me a lesson in Ubuntu release procedures?
> 
> Are they likely to be interested in fixing this?  (so NTS works)
> 
> The fix to 1.1.8 is a simple change to a text literal.  Can they fix their
> copy of the source if we send a patch file?  Would it help if we released a
> patched version of 1.1.8?  ...
> 
> Could we convince them to update to Debian's 1.2.0+xx?  (or our 1.2.0, or
> 1.2.1 our current release)
> 
> ----------
> 
> Long story here:
>    Incompatibility between NTS in ntpsec 1.2.1 and 1.1.8?
>    https://gitlab.com/NTPsec/ntpsec/-/issues/732
> 
> 


-- 
Richard