6 ms·

Interesting, this and phk's ntimed are both sponsored by the Linux Foundation. I guess it makes sense on some level to have concurrent projects that tackle the

by dmit 11y ago

Interesting, this and phk's ntimed are both sponsored by the Linux Foundation. I guess it makes sense on some level to have concurrent projects that tackle the same problem from different directions.

hga 11y ago
Here's ESR's comment on ntimed (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6863&cpage=1#comment-1635375 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6863&cpage=1#comment-1635375): esr on 2015-10-09 at 09:22:05 said: >Eric, what do you think of ntimed and their goal of replacing ntpd? PHK is a bright guy with many clues. I respect him a lot, and I say this despite the fact that he’s hostile to me because he thinks my open-source advocacy has encouraged crappy programming. I have not looked closely at ntimed but I have little doubt it is high-quality work, probably as good as anything I am capable of producing, possibly better. That said, I think ntimed is going nowhere. A clean-sheet design was the right thing from a technical point of view, but it’s not what the time-service userbase wants. Large time-service users are intensely conservative and risk-averse; what they want, and what NTPsec will deliver, is not radical innovation but a cleaned-up and hardened version of what they know. The only active GitHub ntimed fork is for the Amiga/AROS version, and phk's GitHub visible work as of late seems to be mostly on Varnish Cache.
- dmit 11y ago
  >> I have not looked closely at ntimed but I have little doubt it is high-quality work, probably as good as anything I am capable of producing, possibly better. Ok, that is just precious. =) One is a kernel hacker and time-nuts regular with one of the world's most precise clocks in his home, and the other recently wrote: > There’s a longstanding legend that only Dave Mills ever really understood the Byzantine time-synchronization algorithms at NTP’s heart, but I used to be a mathematician and I think I already get most of it outside of a few arcana about statistical filtering of noisy signals. From a purely technical standpoint, I know who I'd bet my money on. By the way, phk recently mentioned that he was getting back into ntimed, so fingers crossed that we get two safe and correct NTP alternatives in the observable future. https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/635635386832715777 https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/635635386832715777
  - hga 11y ago
    While he said as of August 23rd that he's agin working on ntimed, that's not reflected in GitHub updates: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed And it bears mentioning that ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade (a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers), and he sure sounds math literate to my not entirely untutored ears in various discussions over the years. Given the well known curse of total rewrites, which I've experienced myself, I too know who I'd bet my money on.
    - dfc 11y ago
      Saying that GPSD is "a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers" is a little misleading. GPSd primary function is to make "data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors available to...the host computer." It also has functionality to share data with ntpd but timekeeping is certainly not the primary purpose.
    - gonzo 11y ago
      > "he sure sounds math literate" This is the standard ESR parlor trick. Eric took several courses in math and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raymond.html http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raym... "As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania Raymond was immediately marked out as a potential math prodigy. Having found school insufficiently stretching for his above average talents, however, he lacked the necessary discipline or emotional maturity to cope with the demands of an undergraduate course, and after suffering a "math burnout" left without a degree." I'd put my money on phk. Every. Time.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - imglorp 11y ago
      > ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade Timekeeping and location calculation is very easy to do clean sheet. That is, until you start to hit corner cases and exceptions and the realities of physical real world inputs like jitter and offset and dispersion (and those are just the grit that ntpq tells you about) and all the crud humans made up like leap seconds and calendrical calculations. My money's on the guy who's been blowing the grit out of the machine.
- gonzo 11y ago
  Let's look at what phk had to say about esr's advocacy. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 Pull quote: "That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)"
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I regularly drop that link when I see people talk about FOSS's many eyeballs like they inherently mean something. That said, I recently got to read Cathedral and Bazaar. In that, he made good points esp about parallel debugging. I think the truth is somewhere between their two claims. Plan on trying to figure out the specifics in the future. I lean more toward PHK given FOSS model has never produced a high assurance system while proprietary and core team models have done many: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/reverse_heartbl.html#c5581737 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/reverse_heart... Recently I've been redefining the situation to try to find a model that balances the benefits of open-source against the ability to pay a competent team to ensure it's a cathedral. Start of that is here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_424.html#c6051639 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...
RyJones 11y ago
From what I could find ESR's work is funded by ICEI, which is funded by an NSF grant and a CACR grant. Am I missing something? http://icei.org/activities/ntp.html http://icei.org/activities/ntp.html
- dmit 11y ago
  http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6820 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6820 > A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I confirm that NTPsec does exist, and that I am deeply involved in it. https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/faq https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/faq > The Core Infrastructure Initiative is a multi-million dollar project to fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure. It is organized by The Linux Foundation and supported by Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Bloomberg, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, NEC, Qualcomm, RackSpace, salesforce.com, and VMware.
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    It seems like a serious mistake to waste your money on ESR-code. The man's lifetime output of software could have been barfed out by any randomly-selected industry veteran in 2 weeks. Writing all of those Slashdot comments and participating in lunatic-fringe demonstrations of openly carried firearms, of course, must have taken many years of full-time effort.
- gonzo 11y ago
  http://www.ntpsec.org http://www.ntpsec.org

by dmit 11y ago

Interesting, this and phk's ntimed are both sponsored by the Linux Foundation. I guess it makes sense on some level to have concurrent projects that tackle the same problem from different directions.

hga 11y ago

Here's ESR's comment on ntimed (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6863&cpage=1#comment-1635375 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6863&cpage=1#comment-1635375): esr on 2015-10-09 at 09:22:05 said: >Eric, what do you think of ntimed and their goal of replacing ntpd? PHK is a bright guy with many clues. I respect him a lot, and I say this despite the fact that he’s hostile to me because he thinks my open-source advocacy has encouraged crappy programming. I have not looked closely at ntimed but I have little doubt it is high-quality work, probably as good as anything I am capable of producing, possibly better. That said, I think ntimed is going nowhere. A clean-sheet design was the right thing from a technical point of view, but it’s not what the time-service userbase wants. Large time-service users are intensely conservative and risk-averse; what they want, and what NTPsec will deliver, is not radical innovation but a cleaned-up and hardened version of what they know. The only active GitHub ntimed fork is for the Amiga/AROS version, and phk's GitHub visible work as of late seems to be mostly on Varnish Cache.

dmit 11y ago
>> I have not looked closely at ntimed but I have little doubt it is high-quality work, probably as good as anything I am capable of producing, possibly better. Ok, that is just precious. =) One is a kernel hacker and time-nuts regular with one of the world's most precise clocks in his home, and the other recently wrote: > There’s a longstanding legend that only Dave Mills ever really understood the Byzantine time-synchronization algorithms at NTP’s heart, but I used to be a mathematician and I think I already get most of it outside of a few arcana about statistical filtering of noisy signals. From a purely technical standpoint, I know who I'd bet my money on. By the way, phk recently mentioned that he was getting back into ntimed, so fingers crossed that we get two safe and correct NTP alternatives in the observable future. https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/635635386832715777 https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/635635386832715777
- hga 11y ago
  While he said as of August 23rd that he's agin working on ntimed, that's not reflected in GitHub updates: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed And it bears mentioning that ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade (a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers), and he sure sounds math literate to my not entirely untutored ears in various discussions over the years. Given the well known curse of total rewrites, which I've experienced myself, I too know who I'd bet my money on.
  - dfc 11y ago
    Saying that GPSD is "a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers" is a little misleading. GPSd primary function is to make "data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors available to...the host computer." It also has functionality to share data with ntpd but timekeeping is certainly not the primary purpose.
  - gonzo 11y ago
    > "he sure sounds math literate" This is the standard ESR parlor trick. Eric took several courses in math and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raymond.html http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raym... "As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania Raymond was immediately marked out as a potential math prodigy. Having found school insufficiently stretching for his above average talents, however, he lacked the necessary discipline or emotional maturity to cope with the demands of an undergraduate course, and after suffering a "math burnout" left without a degree." I'd put my money on phk. Every. Time.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - imglorp 11y ago
    > ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade Timekeeping and location calculation is very easy to do clean sheet. That is, until you start to hit corner cases and exceptions and the realities of physical real world inputs like jitter and offset and dispersion (and those are just the grit that ntpq tells you about) and all the crud humans made up like leap seconds and calendrical calculations. My money's on the guy who's been blowing the grit out of the machine.
gonzo 11y ago
Let's look at what phk had to say about esr's advocacy. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 Pull quote: "That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)"
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I regularly drop that link when I see people talk about FOSS's many eyeballs like they inherently mean something. That said, I recently got to read Cathedral and Bazaar. In that, he made good points esp about parallel debugging. I think the truth is somewhere between their two claims. Plan on trying to figure out the specifics in the future. I lean more toward PHK given FOSS model has never produced a high assurance system while proprietary and core team models have done many: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/reverse_heartbl.html#c5581737 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/reverse_heart... Recently I've been redefining the situation to try to find a model that balances the benefits of open-source against the ability to pay a competent team to ensure it's a cathedral. Start of that is here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_424.html#c6051639 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...

RyJones 11y ago

From what I could find ESR's work is funded by ICEI, which is funded by an NSF grant and a CACR grant. Am I missing something? http://icei.org/activities/ntp.html http://icei.org/activities/ntp.html

dmit 11y ago
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6820 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6820 > A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I confirm that NTPsec does exist, and that I am deeply involved in it. https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/faq https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/faq > The Core Infrastructure Initiative is a multi-million dollar project to fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure. It is organized by The Linux Foundation and supported by Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Bloomberg, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, NEC, Qualcomm, RackSpace, salesforce.com, and VMware.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  It seems like a serious mistake to waste your money on ESR-code. The man's lifetime output of software could have been barfed out by any randomly-selected industry veteran in 2 weeks. Writing all of those Slashdot comments and participating in lunatic-fringe demonstrations of openly carried firearms, of course, must have taken many years of full-time effort.
gonzo 11y ago
http://www.ntpsec.org http://www.ntpsec.org