Hi everybody! The NTP Public Services Project recently announced the release of ntp-4.2.4p5 and after two weeks of testing I am happy to be able to announce an updated Windows Installer version (nicknamed "beijing" due to the 2008 Olympic Games) including this version and a few minor improvements for the installer itself.
The new NTP version has been declared a recommended upgrade for Windows and comes with some great improvements of the network interface handling code. If you run NTP on a Windows laptop or on a machine that deals with network interface changes (e.g. IP address changes or appearing and disappearing interfaces), you should give it a try. This version handles delayed initialization of network interfaces gracefully, if your NTP service is starting before your network interface(s) could have been initialized properly, NTPD will add these interfaces as soon as they are ready and retries name resolution for configured server and peer entries until it finally found out the corresponding IP addresses. The installer uses a 3 seconds update interval for the network interfaces, i.e. it scans for new interfaces every 3 seconds. During our tests we have seen no significant performance penalty for this and therefore the installer will setup the NTP service with a "-U 3" command line switch. If you want to use this new feature, you should not use the "Update Binaries" functionality of the installer: If it detects an already installed version, it will ask you whether it should only update the binaries. Please answer "no" and afterwards confirm that the current version should be uninstalled first before it finally installs the new version. Your configuration files will not be touched, of course. Another important bugfix allows Windows NT users to use this version as well, no need to stick with an outdated NTP version anymore. 4.2.4p5 will now honor command line parameters you have entered in the SCM management console. All in all IMHO this is a great version especially for Windows users, so please check it out! Our tests with Vista still show suboptimal synchronization performance, we were able to improve this by using faster polling intervals but this is obviously only a valid approach if you use your own internal NTP servers and should not be applied to clients using public NTP servers or the pool. As always: We are happy to receive feedback and comments from everybody using our installer and offer free email support ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). The installer itself and our free Time Server Monitor application can be downloaded from our NTP download page at http://www.meinberg.de/english/sw/ntp.htm If you are located in the US, please use our US Mirror: http://www.meinberg-usa.com/ntp-software.php Cheers, Heiko _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
