Development discussion for StartingNTP4

Use of burst

The StartingNTP4 article says "# Use iburst (or, if appropriate, burst) in the appropriate peer or server lines in your /etc/ntp.conf file."

I believe this needs a little more discussion. In particular, "appropriate" usage of burst needs to be defined. Since the use of burst appears to cause a client to send eight request packets to a server at each poll interval, it is far from clear under what circumstances the use of burst is justified. It certainly seems like a nasty thing to do to a public server.

-- RichardBGilbert - 16 Sep 2004

We mention this again in ConfiguringNTP and folks can search for "burst" in the Go/Search window.

Until somebody provides more information here, the only other place it is documented is in the official documentation tree.

I'm about to head off on a vacation - if nobody beats me to it I'll look for a link to this information in those pages and add it to ConfiguringNTP (unless Steve thinks it should go elsewhere).

-- HarlanStenn - 17 Sep 2004

Okay, I updated the page for StartingNTP4 to provide a bit more information about burst and iburst, and to link to the "confopt.html" page that describes their use. Is there anything more that needs to be done?

-- BradKnowles - 18 Sep 2004