NTP / SNTP for OS-9 revisited...

Allen Huffman

unread,

Apr 10, 2002, 3:05:48 PM4/10/02

to

Over the years there have been a few requests for network time
protocol support for OS-9. I've seen the "rdate" and "nettime"
archives that were posted to os9archive back in 1995 or so, so it
seems anyone who really did some looking could find time sync programs
easily available.

These older utilities were written for OS-9/68K v2.4 -- pre-ANSI,
pre-SoftStax. At the very minimum, a report to ANSI/SoftStax would be
nice. (I recently found and ported an SMTP mail client to OS-9 from
Unix sources with only a few \n changes and some header file/makefile
modifications, so it's pretty easy to do.)

But I thought I'd ask: has anyone ported a true SNTP time sync client
to OS-9 recently? Or does anyone know of a generic C/BSD version
floating around? All the searches I made today showed up Windows NT
versions (tons of them) and some Unix versions, but nothing else. I
saw references to something for QNX, and some VxWorks tidbits, but
nothing I could track down.

Anyone?

-- OS-9 Al
http://os9al.com

Allan R. Batteiger

unread,

Apr 10, 2002, 3:58:12 PM4/10/02

to

alsp...@pobox.com (Allen Huffman) wrote in
news:87c6d55e.02041...@posting.google.com:
Al
I have update the old ntp program on the archive to use
SPF. I have not yet uploaded it yet. I have tested it on 68K
,SARM, and PPC. I have recently doenloaded the UNIX sources
from time.nist.gov. They have recently posted sources to
nisttime. They have sources for both UNIX and Windows. The
Unix sources are pretty straight forward. As soon as I ship
the system I am working on I might have time to take a quick
look at it.

Allan R. Batteiger

--
Allan R. Batteiger
Real-Time Services Inc.
2530 Tarpley #600
Carrollton Tx. 75006
972-245-4239
a...@rtsi.com

Allen Huffman

unread,

Apr 10, 2002, 9:13:42 PM4/10/02

to

Thanks, Allan. I pulled those sources down today -- messy and old
(pre-ANSI stuff!) but I got it to compile. I found out it was much
easier to just write one myself. I mean, the Port 37 (TIME PROTOCOL)
thing is very easy. Open port 37, read 4 bytes, then convert those
"seconds since 1900" to "seconds since 1970" for OS-9/non-68K and
adjust. A dozen lines of C and that was that.

But, NTP would be something very different since it's actually
accurate. TIME and the other procotol give time within a second but
you'd have to poll a few times to average out the results to figure
out network delay -- even then, if you got the packet within a second
you'd be as close as you could get. Maybe that's enough for most
folks.

NTP, anyone?

Allen Huffman

unread,

Apr 11, 2002, 2:38:08 PM4/11/02

to

An easily portable NTP client (msntp) may be found at:

http://www.hpcf.cam.ac.uk/export/

OS-9 changes require mostly the removal of some header files, the
inclusion of others, adding a few #defines and prototypes (for strict
ANSI compiling) and then creating settimeofday() (wrapper to
_os_setime) and fcntl (just enough to turn on socket blocking and
non-blocking). That was pretty much it thanks to Microware's unix.l
compatibility library as well as the general Unix/Linux-like OS-9
itself.

Allan R. Batteiger

unread,

Apr 11, 2002, 4:22:57 PM4/11/02

to

alsp...@pobox.com (Allen Huffman) wrote in
news:87c6d55e.02041...@posting.google.com:

> An easily portable NTP client (msntp) may be found at:

MSNTP as ported to OS9 and validated on OS9/68K and OS9000 has
now been posted to the OS9archive. There is both a makefile
and a Hawk project file now included.
Please look in ftp://os9archive.rtsi.com/OS9/OSK/NETWORK

Your OS9archive host: http://www.rtsi.com/

Allen Huffman

unread,

Apr 11, 2002, 9:08:38 PM4/11/02

to

Since it works for 68K and non-68K, maybe we need a generic place for
stuff that is common? I'm suspecting someone using PowerPC might not
ever set foot in the OSK folder to look around.

Maybe time for a new directory organization?

OS-9
OS-9 6809
OS-9 68K ONLY
OS-9 non-68K ONLY

??? Or maybe just sort them in categories:

...or something?