[time-nuts] future NTP programs...

[David J Taylor]

From: Poul-Henning Kamp
[]
>Personally, I feel that the ability to monitor the workings of an NTP
>implementation remotely is an important feature of the (present) software.

So, this is one thing I really don't understand...

You can monitor all your clients from your server if you want to,
by looing at the timestamp the client sends you.

I implemented this feature in NTPns over a decade ago (see below)

Why on Earth would anybody prefer to monitor it on each client separately
instead of getting one central unified view ?

Yes, of course you should be able to tell if your timekeeping is good
on the local machine, but I don't think the control-mode NTP packets
is a good idea.

Poul-Henning
===================================

Poul-Henning,

But if I understand NTPns correctly (I didn't know about it, by the way), it 
does not address the task I have in mind.  I don't want to monitor clients 
from my server.  I don't want to monitor servers from my client.  I want to 
be able to monitor a number of servers from a central monitoring point 
(which might not even be running NTP), and using ntpq with its different 
options is, for me, an ideal way to do that.  I use Perl scripts to 
interpret the output and plot it with MRTG.  What I'm doing at the moment 
happens to run on Windows, but as it's a combination of ntpq, Perl and MRTG 
is could be run almost anywhere....

Cheers,
David
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Email: david-taylor at blueyonder.co.uk