Subject: Re: [Ntp] Martin Duke's No Objection on draft-ietf-ntp-mode-6-cmds-09: (with COMMENT)

From: Hal Murray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2020 02:31:12 -0700

[email-masked] said:
>> With a document of this type, I am not sure if all of these type codes
>> and bit settings should be IANA registries or not.

I don't think it's appropriate to standardize the status words. 

> The WG discussed this option several years ago and decided that there wasn't
> any expectation of new mode 6 commands being added beyond the ones added
> between RFC 1305 and RFC 5905. 

That opens an interesting can of worms.

A significant fraction of the document is describing the details of 4 status 
words.  There is no corresponding description of the variables you can 
read/write via the Read Variables command and friends.

I think the status word descriptions should be moved to an appendix.  Some 
introductory material needs to explain that the details of what you can 
read/write are vendor dependent.  If you are going to use this document, you 
also need documentation (or code) for the implementation you are going to 
talke to that enumerates the names of variables you can access and describes 
their meaning.  RFC 5905 covers some of that for one implementation.  It 
doesn't describe the status words.  Their description is included here so you 
don't have to dig it out of the code.

-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.

---

From: "Ulrich Windl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2020 11:16:23 +0200

>>> Hal Murray <[email-masked]> schrieb am 29.08.2020 um 11:31 in

>> between RFC 1305 and RFC 5905. 

But actually new commands were defined after RFC 5905, e.g. CTL_OP_READ_MRU
and CTL_OP_REQ_NONCE.

> read/write via the Read Variables command and friends.

I also had this thought, whether to "modularize" the mode-6:

* General packet format and operations

* implementation details for individual operations (like the list of variables
and their meanings)

> don't have to dig it out of the code.

Once when I wrote some monitoring program for NTPv4(!), I realized that I had
to get the details from RFC 1303 and draft-odonoghue-ntpv4-control-02. They did
not always match...

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