[ntpwg] [dhcwg] NTP option: IP address and/or FQDN

[Danny Mayer]

MORAND Lionel RD-CORE-ISS wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> During the meeting, we discussed again the use of FQDN for advertizing
> NTP servers.
> 
> During the work on the PANA option, we had exactly the same discussion
> (in the meeting and on the mailing list) and the conclusions was the
> same: we SHOULD use IP address list instead of FQDN. The SHOULD is there
> to say that it might be some cases where the use of FQDN would be
> valuable/really required.

Don't you think that you should have also discussed this with the NTP
folks as well? Most of the DHCP discussion only happened because we were
asked to review the draft.

> As it seems that, after at least two long discussions in the same topic,
> there is a "common" understanding on how should be advertize servers, it
> could be useful to capture these conclusions as guidelines in the
> dhc-option-guidelines draft. This would help a lot other working groups
> when they will have to design new options for the same usage.

I'm not yet convinced that this conclusion is really warranted since
this will force NTP to use only a single IP address for each server
instead of being able to use the pool option which provides a lot of
flexibility. It's not in the NTPv4 draft but that shouldn't matter since
 this is about provisioning NTP and not about a specific implementation.
Don't forget that NTP will have to live with the decisions you make
about what you tell it to use. It's either that or the options will get
ignored and neither result is desired. I'd like to discuss how this will
be operationally implemented before we can make a decision on whether or
not IP addresses are the way to go.

I am copying the NTP WG on this so we can get other people's input.

Danny