pylib documentation / examples?

[Hal Murray]

> Is there any documentation for ntpsec pylib? And/or examples?

There isn't any documentation.  You can read the code.  I find it very 
hard to read/understand.  YMMV.

The best example is probably ntpq

docs/mode6.adoc has a description of the on-wire protocol
I don't know how up to date it is
That may help you understand how things work.

You can use tcpdump to look at the wire while poking a server with ntpq
Most of the answers are text in the form name=value


> For a visualization project, I'm trying to retrieve as much variables
> from a running ntpsec isntance as there are available. 

That could be interesting.  Please let us know how it turns out.

There are 4 types of data.  Maybe more that I can't think of right now.

The first is global variables.
The second is counters.
The third is per-interface data.
The fourth is the mru list.

counters are like global variables but each counter has a friend that is 
the value since the last hourly log files were written.

Part of your problem is going to be getting a list of the variables.  Look 
in ntpd/ntp_control.c
sys_var is a list of the global variables.  (I'd like to split that out to 
a text file that can be preprocessed and shared by ntp_control and ntpq.)

You can read a global variable with ntpq -c "rv 0 <name>"
"rv 0" with no name will give you the default collection.

The per-interface info is used for ntpq -p
Look for peer_var2 in ntp_control.c

The per-interface stuff needs a magic number.  You can get them via ntpq 
apeers
Again, "rv <nnn>" will give you the defaults.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.