MSNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol Utility) - Version 1.6 ---------------------------------------------------------- Please read the file Copyright first. Also note that the file RFC2030.TXT is David Mills's copyright and not the author's - it is just a copy of the RFC that is available from so many Internet archives. RFC 1305 (Network Time Protocol - NTP) is an attempt to provide globally consistent timestamps in an extremely hostile environment; it is fiendishly complicated and an impressive piece of virtuosity. RFC 2030 (Simple Network Time Protocol - SNTP) which supersedes RFC 1769 describes a subset of this that will give excellent accuracy in most environments encountered in practice; it uses only the obvious algorithms that have been used since time immemorial. WARNING: the text version of RFC 1305 is incomplete, and omits the tables that are in the Postscript version. Unfortunately, these contain the only copy of some critical information. The canonical NTP code for Unix is the xntp suite, and is as complicated as would be expected from reading RFC 1305. While its code is moderately clean by Unix and C standards, version 3-5.86 is over 80,000 lines and unavoidably system-dependent. A worse problem is that it is so badly fouled up by its configuration mechanism that ab initio porting could be several weeks' work, even if the new system has all the necessary facilities and is bug free! SNTP Servers - Some Little-Known Facts -------------------------------------- RFC 2030 states that SNTP clients should be used only at the lowest level, which is good practice. It then states that SNTP servers should be used only at stratum 1 (i.e. top level), which is bizarre! A far saner use of them would be for the very lowest level of server, exporting solely to local clients that do not themselves act as servers to ANY system (e.g. on a Netware server, exporting only to the PCs that it manages). If the NTP network were being run as a directed acyclic graph (i.e. using SNTP rather than full NTP), with a diameter of D links and a maximum error per link of E, the maximum synchronisation error would be D*E. Reasonable figures for D and E are 5 and 0.1 seconds, so this would be adequate for most uses. Note that the fact that the graph is acyclic is critical, which is one reason why SNTP client/servers must NEVER be embedded WITHIN an NTP network. The other reason is that inserting SNTP client/servers at a low stratum (but not the root) of an NTP network could easily break NTP! See RFC 1305 for why, but don't expect the answer to stand out at you. It would be easy to extend MSNTP to a full-function client/server application, thus making it into a true alternative to xntp, but this incompatibility is why it MUST NOT be done. The above does not mean that the SNTP approach is unsatisfactory, but only that it is incompatible with full NTP. The author would favour a complete SNTP network using the SNTP approach, and the statistical error reduction used in MSNTP, but it actually addresses a slightly different problem from that addressed by NTP. TANSTAAFL. FINAL WARNING: do NOT use this program to serve NTP requests from outside the systems that you manage. If you do this, and manage to break the time synchronisation on other people's systems, you will be regarded very unfavourably. Actually, this should be possible only if their NTP client is completely broken, because MSNTP does its damnedest to declare its packets as the lowest form of NTP timestamp. MSNTP and its Assumptions ------------------------- MSNTP is intended to be a straightforward SNTP daemon/utility that is easy to build on any reasonable Unix platform (and most near-Unix ones), whether or not it has ever been ported to them before. It is intended to answer the following requirements, either by challenge and response or the less reliable broadcast method: A simple command to run on Unix systems that will check the time and optionally drift compared with a known, local and reliable NTP time server. No privilege is required just to read the time and estimate the drift. A client for Unix systems that will synchronise the time from a known, local and reliable NTP time server. This is probably the most common one, and the need that caused the program to be written. A server for Unix systems that are synchronised other than by NTP methods and that need to synchronise other systems by NTP. This is the classroom of PCs with a central server scenario. It is NOT intended to work as a peer with true NTP servers, and won't. A simple method by which two or more Unix systems can keep themselves synchronised using what is becoming a standard protocol. Yes, I know that there are half-a-dozen other such methods. A base for building non-Unix SNTP clients. Some 3/4 of the code (including all of the complicated algorithms and NTP packet handling) should work, unchanged, on any system with an ANSI/ISO C compiler. There are full tracing facilities and a lot of paranoia in the code to check for bad packets (more than in xntp) which may need relaxing in the light of experience. Unfortunately, RFC 1305 does not include a precise description of the data protocol, despite its length, and there are some internal inconsistencies and differences between it and RFC 2030 and xntp3-5's behaviour. WARNING: MSNTP has not been tested in conjunction with xntp broadcasts or xntp clients, as the ability to do so was not available to the author. It is very unlikely that it won't work, but you should check. Much of the paranoid code is only partially tested, too, because it is dealing with cases that are very hard to provoke. It assumes that the local network is tolerably secure and that any accessible NTP or SNTP servers are trustworthy. It also makes no attempt to check that it has been installed and is being used correctly (e.g. at an appropriate priority) or that the changes it makes have the desired effect. When you first use it, you should both run it in display mode and use the date command as a cross-check. Furthermore, it does not attempt to solve all of the problems addressed by the NTP protocol and you should NOT use it if any of those problems are likely to cause you serious trouble. If they are, bite the bullet and implement xntp, or buy a fancy time-server. Building SNTP ------------- The contents of the distribution are: README - this file Copyright - the copyright notice and conditions of use Makefile - the makefile, with comments for several systems header.h - the main header (almost entirely portable) kludges.h - dirty kludges for difficult systems internet.h - a very small header for internet.c and socket.c main.c - most of the source (almost entirely portable) unix.c - just for isatty, sleep and locking internet.c - Internet host and service name lookup socket.c - the Berkeley socket code msntp.1 - the man page RFC2030.TXT - the SNTPv4 specification All you SHOULD need to do is to uncomment the settings in file Makefile for your system or to add new ones. But real life is not always so simple. As POSIX does not yet define sub-second timers, Internet addressing facilities, sockets etc., the code has to rely on the facilities described in the ill-defined and non-standard 'X/Open' documents and the almost totally unspecified 'BSD' extensions. Most hacks should be limited to the compiler options (e.g. setting flags like _XOPEN_SOURCE), but perverse systems may need additions to kludges.h - please report them to the author. See Makefile and kludges.h for documentation on the standard hacks - there only 6, and most are only for obsolete systems. But, generally, using the generic set of C options usually works with no further ado. Sick, Bizarre or non-Unix Systems --------------------------------- A very few Unix systems and almost all non-Unix systems may need changes to the code, such as: If the system doesn't have Berkeley sockets, you will need to replace socket.c and possibly modify internet.h and internet.c. All of the systems for which the author needs this have Berkeley sockets. NTP is supposedly an Internet protocol, but is not Internet specific. For other types of network, you will need to replace internet.c and probably modify internet.h. If the system doesn't have gettimeofday or settimeofday, you will need to modify timing.c. If it doesn't have adjtime (e.g. HP-UX on PA-RISC before 10.0), you can set -DADJTIME_MISSING and the code will compile but the -a option will always give an error. If the system has totally broken signal handling, the program will hang or crash if it can't reach its name server or responses time out. You may be able to improve matters by hacking internet.c and socket.c, but don't bet on it. If the the program won't be able to create files in /etc when updating the clock, you can use another lock file or even set -DLOCKFILE=NULL, which will disable the locking code entirely. On systems that have it, using /var/run would be better than /etc. If the the program hangs when flushing outstanding packets (which you can tell by setting -W), it may help to set -DNONBLOCK_BROKEN. This seems needed only for obsolete systems, like Ultrix. If the system isn't Unix, even vaguely, you will probably need to modify all of the above, and unix.c as well. Note that adjtime is commonly sick, but you don't need to change the code - just use the -r option whan making large corrections (see below for more details). Any changes needed to header.h or main.c are bugs. They may be bugs in the code or in the compiler or libraries, but they are bugs. Please prod the people responsible and tell the author, who may be able to bypass them cleanly even if they aren't bugs in his code. The code also makes the following assumptions, which would be quite hard to remove: 8-bit bytes. Strictly, neither ANSI/ISO C nor POSIX require these, and there were some very early versions of Unix on systems with other byte sizes. But, without a defined sub-byte facility in C, .... At least 32-bit ints. Well, actually, this wouldn't be too hard to remove. But most Unix programs make this assumption, and I have very little interest in the more rudimentary versions of MS-DOS etc. An ANSI/ISO C compiler. It didn't seem worth writing dual-language code in 1996. Tough luck if you haven't got one. Tolerably efficient floating-point arithmetic, with at least 13 digits (decimal), preferably 15, in the mantissa of doubles. Ditto. If you want to port this to a toaster, please accept my insincerest sympathies and don't bother me. A trustworthy local network. It does not check for DNS, Ethernet, packet or other spoofing, and assumes that any accessible NTP or SNTP servers are properly synchronised. Warnings about Installation and Use ----------------------------------- Anyone attempting to fiddle with the clock on their system should already know how to write system administration scripts, install daemons and so on. There are a few warnings: Don't use the broadcast modes unless you really have to, as the client-server modes are far more reliable. The broadcast modes were implemented more for virtuosity (a.k.a. SNTP conformance) than use. In particular, the error estimates are mere guesses, and may be low or even very low. And even reading broadcasts needs privilege. The program is not intended to be installed setuid or setgid, and doing so is asking for trouble. Its ownerships and access modes are not important. It need not be run by root for merely displaying the time (even in daemon mode). The program does not need to run at a high priority (low in Unix terms!) even when being used to set the clock or as a server, except when the '-r' option is used. However, doing so may improve its accuracy. Unlike NTP, the SNTP protocol contains no protection against client-server loops. If you set one up, your systems will spin themselves off into a disconnected vortex of unreality! It will get very confused if another process changes the local time while it is running. There is some locking code in unix.c to prevent this program doing this to itself, but it will protect only against some errors. However, the remaining failures should be harmless. Don't run it as a server unless you REALLY know what you are doing. It should be used as a server only on a system that is properly synchronised, by fair means or foul. If it isn't, you will simply perpetrate misinformation. And remember that broadcasts are most unpopular with overloaded administrators of overloaded networks. Watch out for multi-server broadcasts and systems with multiple ports onto the same Ethernet; there is some code to protect against this, but it is still easy to get confused. Don't put the lock file onto an automounted partition or delete it by hand, unless you really want to start two daemons at the same time. Both will probably fail horribly if you do this. The daemon save file is checked fairly carefully, but should be in a reasonably safe directory, unless you want hackers to cause trouble. /tmp is safe enough on most systems, but not all - /etc is better. Installing and Using the Program -------------------------------- Start by copying the executable and man page to where you want them. If you want only to display the time and as a replacement for the rdate or date commands, the installation is finished! You can use it as a simple unprivileged command to check the time, quite independently of whether it is running as a time-updating daemon or server, or whether you are running xntp. You can run it in daemon mode without updating the clock, to check for drift, but it may fail if the clock is changed under its feet. Unfortunately, you cannot listen to broadcasts without privilege. If it is used with the -a option to keep the time synchronised, it is best to run it as one of root's cron jobs - for many systems, running it once a day should be adequate, but it will depend on the reliability of the local clock. The author runs it this way with -a and -x - see below. If it is used with the -r option to set the time (instead of the rdate or date commands), it should be used interactively and either on a lightly loaded system or at a high priority. You should then check the result by running it in display mode. You are advised NOT to run it with the -r option in a cron job, though this is not locked out. If you have to (for example under HP-UX before 10.0), be sure to run it as the highest priority that will not cause other system problems and set the maximum automatic change to as low a value as you can get away with. WARNING: adjtime is more than a bit sick on many systems, and will ignore large corrections, usually without any form of hint that it has done so. It is often (even usually) necessary to reset the clock to approximately the right time using the -r option before using the -a and -x options to keep it correct. It can be started as a time-updating daemon with the -a and -x options (or -r and -x if you must), and will perform some limited drift correction. In this case, start it from any suitable system initialisation script and leave it running. Note that it will stop if it thinks that the time difference or drift has got out of control, and you will need to reset the time and restart it by hand. In daemon mode, it will survive its time server or network disappearing for a while, but will eventually fail, and will fail immediately if the network call returns an unexpected error. If this is a problem, you can start it (say, hourly or nightly) from cron, and it will fail if it is already running (provided that you haven't disabled or deleted the lock file). If it is used as a server, it should be started from any suitable system initialisation script, just like any other daemon. It must be started after the networking, of course. To run it in both server modes, start one copy with the -B option and one with the -S option. Simple Examples of Use ---------------------- Many people use it solely to check the time of their system, especially as a cross-check on xntpd. You do not need privilege and it will not cause trouble to the local network, so you can use it on someone else's system! You can specify one server or several. For example: msntp ntp.server.local ntp.server.neighbour You can use it to check how your system is drifting, but it isn't very good at this if the system is drifting very badly (in which case use the previous technique and dc) or if you are running xntp. You do not need privilege and it will not cause trouble to the local network. For example: msntp -x 120 -f /tmp/msntp.state ntp.server.local More generally, it is used to synchronise the clock, in which case you DO need root privilege. It can be used in many ways, but the author favours running it in daemon mode, started from a cron job, which will restart after power cuts with no attention, and send a mail message (if cron is configured to do that) when it fails badly. For example, the author uses a root crontab entry on one system of: 15 0 * * * /bin/nice --10 /usr/local/bin/msntp -a -x 480 ntp.server.local If you have a home computer, it can be set up to resynchronise each time you dial up. For example, the author uses a /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/msntp file on his home Linux system of: #!/bin/sh sleep 60 /bin/nice --10 /usr/local/sbin/msntp -r -P 60 ntp.server.local -a would be better, but adjtime is broken in Linux. Debugging or Hacking the Program -------------------------------- Almost everybody who does this is likely to need to modify only the system interfaces. While they are messy, they are pretty simple and have a simple specification. This is documented in comments in the source. This is described above. The main program SHOULD need no attention, though it may need the odd tweak to bypass compiler problems - please report these, if you encounter any. If something looks odd while it is running, start by setting the -v option (lower case), as for investigating network problems, and checking any diagnostics that appear. Note that most of it can be checked in display mode without harming your system. The client will sometimes give up, complaining about inconsistent timestamps or similar. This can be caused by the server being rebooted and similar glitches to the time - unfortunately, there is no reliable way to tell an ignorable fluctuation from a server up the spout. If this happens annoyingly often, the -V option may help tie down the problem. In actual use, it is simplest just to restart the client in a cron job! If it needs more than this, then you will need to debug the source seriously. Start by putting an icepack on your head and pouring yourself a large whisky! While it is commented, it is not well commented, and much of the code interacts in complex and horrible ways. This isn't so much because it lacks 'structure' as because one part needs to make assumptions about the numerical properties of another. The -W option (upper case) will print out a complete trace of everything it does, and this should be enough to tie down the problem. It does distort the timing a bit, but not usually too badly. However, wading through that amount of gibberish (let alone looking at the source) is not a pleasant task. If you are pretty sure that you have a bug, you may tell the author, and he may ask for a copy of the output - but he will reply rudely if you send thousands of lines of tracing to him by Email! Note that there are a fair number of circumstances where its error recovery could be better, but is left as it is to keep the code simple. Most of these should be pretty rare. Changes in Version 1.2 ---------------------- The main change was the addition of the daemon mode for drift correction (i.e. the -x option). The daemon code is complex and has a lot of special-casing for strange circumstances, not all of which are testable in practice. A lot of the code was reordered while doing this. The output was slightly different - considerably different with -V. The error estimation for broadcasts was modified, and should bear more relation to reality. It remains a guess, as there is no way to get decent error error estimates under such circumstances. The -B option is now in minutes, and has a different permissible range and default value. The argument consistency checking for broadcasts was tightened up a bit, and a few other internal checks added. These should not affect any reasonable requirement. A couple of new functions were added to the portability base, but they don't use any non-standard new facilities. However, the specification of the functions has changed slightly. Changes in Version 1.3 ---------------------- The main change was the addition of the restarting facility for daemon mode (i.e. the -f option), which is pretty straightforward. There were also a lot of minor changes to the paranoia code in daemon mode, to try to separate out the case of a demented server from network and other 'ignorable' problems. These are not entirely successful. Changes in Version 1.4 and 1.5 ------------------------------ There turned out to be a couple of places where the author misunderstood the specification of NTP, which affect only its use in server mode. The main change is to use stratum 15 instead of stratum 0. And there were some more relaxations of the paranoia code, to allow for more erratic servers, plus a kludge to improve restarting in daemon mode after a period of down time has unsynchronised the clock. There is also an incompatible change to the debugging options to add a new level - the old -V option is now -W, and -V is an intermediate one for debugging daemon mode - but they are both hacker's facilities, and not for normal use. Version 1.5 adds some very minor fixes. Changes in Version 1.6 ---------------------- The first change is support for multiple server addresses - it uses these in a round-robin fashion. This may be useful when you have access to several servers, all of which are a bit iffy. This means that the restart file format is incompatible with msntp 1.5. It has also been modified to reset itself automatically after detecting an inconsistency in its server's timestamps, because the author got sick of the failures. It writes a comment to syslog (uniquely) in such cases. The ability to query a daemon save file was added. Related to the above, the -E argument has been redefined to mean an error bound on various internal times (which is what it had become, anyway) and a -P option introduced to be what the -E argument was documented to be. The lock and save file handling have been changed to allow defaults to be set at installation time, and to be overridable at run-time. To disable these at either stage, simply set the file names to the null string. And there have been the usual changes for portability, as standards have been modified and/or introduced. Future Versions --------------- There are unlikely to be any, except probably one to fix bugs in version 1.6. I attempted to put support for intermittent connexions (e.g. dial-up) into the daemon mode, but doing so needs so much code reorganisation that it isn't worth it. What needs doing for that is to separate the socket handling from the timekeeping, so that they can be run asynchronously (either in separate processes or threads), and to look up a network name and open a socket only when prodded (and to close it immediately thereafter). So just running it with the -r option is the current best solution. I also attempted to put support for the "Unix 2000" interfaces into the code. Ha, ha. Not merely do very few systems define socklen_t (needed for IPv6 support), but "Unix 2000" neither addresses the leap second problem nor even provides an adjtime replacement! Some function like the latter is critical, not so much because of the gradual change, but because of its atomicity; without it, msntp really needs to be made non-interruptible, and that brings in a ghastly number of system-dependencies. Realistically, it needs a complete rewrite before adding any more function. And, worse, the Unix 'standards' need fixing, too. Miscellaneous ------------- Thanks are due to Douglas M. Wells of Connection Technologies for helping the author with several IP-related conventions, to Sam Nelson of Stirling University for testing it on some very strange systems, and to David Mills for clarifying what the NTP specification really is. Thanks are also due to several other people with locating bugs, finding appropriate options for the Makefile and passing on extension code and suggestions. As I am sure to leave someone out, I shall not name anyone else. Version 1.0 - October 1996. Version 1.1 - November 1996 - mainly portability improvements. Version 1.2 - January 1997 - mainly drift handling, but much reorganisation. Version 1.3 - February 1997 - daemon save file, and some robustness changes. Version 1.4 - May 1997 - relatively minor fixes, more diagnostic levels etc. Version 1.5 - December 1997 - some very minor fixes Version 1.6 - October 2000 - quite a few miscellaneous changes Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England. Email: nmm1@cam.ac.uk Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679