The timed and I aren't getting along very well

[Benson I. Margulies]

In article <617 at celit.fps.com> jpa at fps.com (Jeff Anderson) writes:
>In article <8909081936.AA10167 at garnet.berkeley.edu> 
>rusty at GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU writes:
>>Toss timed and use ntp.  I tried the various known-to-work-on-suns
>>patches for the 4.3 timed and was never able to get it to work well.
>>ntp is much better anyways.
>
>Well that's a responsible attitude.  Come on guys, if it doesn't work on
>your machine, lets fix it.  That's what other vendors have to do, and I
>can't believe it's that hard.  We have enough standards already without
>implementing new ones because a single vendor doesn't like it.  I have
>customers who use timed.  I'm supposed to tell them to change?  Because
>Sun's not happy?  Timed is functional and it's an established standard --
>maybe not the best, but it works TODAY on FPS machines, and DEC machines,
>and probably lots of others.

A- You may be flaming the right vendor, but surely for the wrong reason.

1) rusty has nothing to do with Sun, so far as I know.

2) Sun don't even supply timed. Nor does it supply ntp. All they supply
is tired old rdate, which is pretty inadequate for keeping a mare's nest
of workstations in some faint sort of agreement.

As Sun users, I (and I presume, perhaps incorrectly) rusty have better
things to do with our time then port timed to SunOS. And our leverage
with sun is the usual: nil. So don't flame us for looking for
solutions wherever we can get them.

B- NTP and timed are two different things. timed's excuse for
existence is to take a bunch of equally (un)trustworthy clocks and try
to keep them in sync. It sure seems to feel free about using a lot of
CPU power to do so. NTP's purpose is to start with some source of
reliable time (like a fuzzball or a WWV receiver) and distribute it
hierarchically. Different sites fit the two different paradigms.  It
would be nice if both capabilities were integrated into one package.
They ain't.




-- 
Benson I. Margulies