[ntpwg] draft minutes from Vancouver NTP WG meeting

[Shane Kerr]

Danny,

> Personally, I don't care what the WG is called, though TICTOC is still a
> BOF rather than a WG. There are different issues being addressed in the
> two groups and if that means two subgroups under an umbrella group,
> that's fine. The current TICTOC seems to be concerned about IEEE1588v2
> and support for it. I'm sure there's more than that but it didn't come
> through very well. From NTP's point of your that's something several
> levels below the one that NTP operates on and therefore by it's very
> nature will have a more restricted applicability. I suspect that NTP
> would probably implement 1588 as a refclock.
> 
> Outside of IEEE1588v2 what does TICTOC want to get done? The same
> question about NTPv4, autokey and MIB needs to be asked of the NTP WG. I
> do know of one authentication proposal that has been raised but it needs
> to be drafted.

I was at the TICTOC BoF, and some of the ideas were interesting to me (as a
non-time guy):

- Using different paths for time than for other network activity (since we care
  about jitter not delay):

- Recording the delays introduced by routers and switches in the path a packet
  takes from one point in the network to the other to give more accurate time.

I would say that TICTOC did *not* seem to be concerned only with IEEE 1588,
although one message I came away with was that IEEE 1588 comes out of a more
experimental direction than most IEEE standards that the IETF deals with, and so
is very open to working with other groups on making it more useful.

If you didn't see them, slides are available at:

http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07dec/slides/tictoc-0/
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07dec/slides/tictoc-1/
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07dec/slides/tictoc-2/
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07dec/slides/tictoc-3/
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07dec/slides/tictoc-4/

My basic sense of the room was that people are interested in doing time-related
work, but don't know where to do that at the IETF, hence TICTOC.

--
Shane