Hi,

On 09/08/2005 01:34 PM, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 1:28 AM -0700 2005-09-08, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
>>  I thought 3 servers were supposed to be enough to protect against
>>  a false-ticker?
>     No.  3 is the absolute minimum you need to be able to reliably
> select a syspeer, but if-and-only-if all three clocks are "sane". You
> need at least four to protect against a single falseticker, five to
> protect against two false tickers, etc....

If all are sane, you can do with one, can't you? As long as you select a
sane one, it's OK. Or do I understand 'sane' incorrectly?

>     See
> <http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Support/SelectingOffsiteNTPServers#Section_5.3.3.>
> for details.

Each time I read about this, I start wondering. From my knowledge of
measurement in general, if you do one measurement, you get a result. If you
do two or more independent measurements, and apply the correct math, you get
a better result. With three and more measurements, you can detect out
layers. One important piece of information for this to work with a few
measurements is knowledge about the error margin for each measurement. The
ntp-protocol replies contain some info that enables an estimate of the
error, so I think all ingredients are there.

I guess this is not really for a discussion on this list. So, I've put my
way of thinking on http://www.xs4all.nl/~arnold/files/ntp.txt and I welcome
any comments via the email address on that page. The main thing I wonder
about is: is my way of thinking wrong, or is it the way ntpd is implemented
(of which I have no detailed knowledge)?

Kind regards,
   Arnold &:-)

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