Post Description

This book is all about wrangling a herd of network computers so that all display the correct time. This may seem like a really narrow business, but the issues go far beyond winding the clock on your display taskbar. Carefully coordinated, reliable and accurate time is vital for traffic control in the air and on the ground, buying and selling things and TV network programming. Even worse, ill-gotten time might cause DNS caches to expire and the entire Internet to implode on the root servers, which was considered a serious threat on the eve of the Millennium in 1999. Critical data files might expire before they are created, and an electronic message might arrive before it was sent. Reliable and accurate computer time is necessary for any real-time distributed computer application, which is what much of our public infrastructure has become.

This book speaks to the technological infrastructure of time dissemination, distribution and synchronization, specifically the architecture, protocols and algorithms of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTP has been active in one form or another for over almost three decades on the public Internet and numerous private networks on the nether side of firewalls. Just about everything today that can be connected to a network wire has support for NTP - print servers, wi-fi access points, routers and printers of every stripe and even battery backup systems. NTP subnets are in space, on the seabed, onboard warships and on every continent, including Antarctica. NTP comes with most flavors of Windows as well as all flavors of Unix. About 25 million clients implode on the NTP time servers at NIST alone.

David L. Mills
CRC Press 2011, 466 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4398-1463-5
gepost door : Rockhound57