On 1/18/12 3:07 PM, Alex Karasulu wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:44 PM, STF<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm wondering why ApacheDS also provides NTP service. Is NTP a compulsory
part of LDAP?
NTP is not a compulsory part of ApacheDS. ApacheDS has a modular network
layer to allow any kind of directory backed protocol to be plugged into it
to serve directory data in another protocol like DNS, DHCP, or Kerberos.
Now we just wrote an NTP module because (1) it was easy to do so to test
the layer along side LDAP and Kerberos (2) Kerberos might need it to
synchronize time across ApacheDS instances. Kerberos is time sensitive.
Not that I don't like it, but normally it would be better to have
specialized softwares (ie concentrate in one thing) than "Swiss army knife"
softwares which normally would tend to have average performance.
Understood this does not at first seem close to the very important UNIX
philosophy making a single thing do that thing really well. We do have this
philosophy for the modules. If you want it plug it in if not don't.
And NTP service could be provided either by another software or by the
underlying O/S
Sometimes people screw up and don't do this right so we included it in case
it's needed for Kerberos. It was really easy to do so we did it. Later on
it might prove very useful when the Kerberos becomes more popular.
Also note that this is not even close to be a NTP server : it just
delivers the local computer time, nothing more, so if your local
computer is not NTP synchronized itself, then it may be totally inaccurate.
Pretty much a proof of concept, as Alex said...
--
Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
