[time-nuts] future NTP programs...

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Mon Nov 10 19:05:00 EST 2014


David and Poul-Henning,

On 11/10/2014 10:34 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> --------
> In message <647BB61DCE1F4679A45CD5C1DB1FE963 at Alta>, "David J Taylor" writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> First of all, I'm focusing on the client software right now.
>
> That said: It goes without saying that monitoring servers is a
> different ball-game than monitoring clients.
>
> And no, I still don't like the ntpq stuff, because it cannot express
> the kind of things you'll want to monitor on a server, if you are
> serious about running it:
>
> How many clients report us as their REFID (is there something
> horribly wrong in a firewall somewhere ?)
>
> How many satelites does my GPS see ?
>
> And so on...
>
> How I'll doing the monitoring once I get to the server software
> remains to be seen, but it is very likely to involve a CLI interface
> and possibly a shared memory state
>
> Pretty much like Varnish
>
> ... feel free to wonder why ? :-)
>

I think it is fair to consider that over time, we need to revisit how 
things was designed and make changes. It might be better to run a 
separate daemon for the monitoring protocol, and it could be providing 
the traditional monitoring protocol or something new, or both.

Monitoring as such is an important task, and some of the NTP clients 
might be servers in other contexts, and then it makes sense to monitor 
that they got their NTP time into shape. There is however many ways to 
slice that fish.

Cheers,
Magnus


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