I am new to NTP protocol. I read the RFC1305 and have some questions about NTP. My questions are related to NTP working modes. According to RFC1305 there are 8 modes
| 0 | reserved
| 1 | symmetric active
| 2 | symmetric passive
| 3 | client
| 4 | server
| 5 | broadcast
| 6 | NTP control message
| 7 | reserved for private use
My questions:
1- What are the differences between the symmetric passive device and symmetric active one?
2- Two symmetric active device can sync each other and Two passive active device can sync each other too ,but Can a symmetric passive device been synced by a symmetric active one and vice versa?
3- When a Symmetric passive device is connected to symmetric active one which one sends the NTP packet first?
4- What happens in broadcasting mode? Does the client send any NTP packet or only the broadcaster does that?
5- ”in order to sync some clients who have CLASS D IP ‘s , the server fills the 3 time stamp fields(receive time stamp is null) and set the mode to 5 and send the packet to 224.0.1.1 and clients get that packet and they send nothing in this procedure” Is this true?
6- Who sends the NTP control message? Client or broadcaster? What’s it for? What’s the appropriate answer for it?is it always 12 bytes long?
7- “A stratum 1 NTP server (GPS connected) acts like this: answer mode 1 requests with mode 2, mode 3 with mode 4 and mode 6 with 7” Is this true?
can only reply to a few questions:
-4. only the server (broadcaster) is allowed to send any ntp-packet in this mode clients only listen to the interface, parse the received packet and set their clock accordingly - there is no reply being send. but clients may send a ntp-request too, the server should then not reply to this one.
-5. right. there is no answer supposed to be send by this clients.