Keynote: Me, NTP, The NTP Project, and Network Time Foundation
Keynote: Me, NTP, The NTP Project, and Network Time Foundation - How We Got Here: Welcome to my Hallucination
Timekeeping has been a “thing” for humans for thousands of years. We generally do it without thinking about it. Doing it provably well, or even “better”, takes a possibly surprising amount of attention, consideration, and collaboration. Maybe even perspicacity.
The first significant attempt to synchronize accurate network time might have been documented by Prof. David L. Mills, PhD, in February of 1981, in IEN-173. Dave’s work on the Network Time Protocol, with the help of a few other dedicated folks, quickly gelled and evolved. The evolution and refinement of NTP continues.
This talk will cover various milestones that have occurred in my life, in the NTP Project, and with Network Time Foundation. With any luck, some aspects of the symbiotic connections around NTP and some of its primary contributors will be highlighted.
Harlan Stenn: Harlan Stenn is a nearly 50-year veteran of the IT industry. Harlan began programming computers in high school in 1971. He holds a bachelors degree in Business Administration (Accounting) from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and an MSE in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. A well-versed entrepreneur, Harlan has launched several successful businesses and has been a respected, sought-after I/T consultant and contractor for decades who is well known for writing astonishingly portable C code since the early 1980s. He became interested in the issues around timekeeping on computers in the early 80s, and started submitting bug fixes and portability improvements to the Network Time Protocol codebase, then contributing to the NTP Project in the 90s. Shortly thereafter he became the project manager/release engineer/code monkey. To put it another way, if NTP is Dave Mills' edifice, Harlan is its janitor. In mid-2011 he started Network Time Foundation (NTF), with the mission to provide direct services and support to improve the state of accurate computer network timekeeping. NTF now works with several time-related projects, including NTP, Ntimed, Linux PTP, RADclock, and the General Timestamp API and Library. The GTSAPI is a way to make sure that a timestamp contains enough information to be useful outside of the system on which it was “taken". Several new projects are in the works, including Khronos, and several SyncE packages. Heiko Gerstung, a Managing Director at Meinberg Funkuhren GmbH & CO. (one of Network Time Foundation’s earliest partners) describes Harlan’s job thus: “Harlan is doing a fantastic job as the Programme Manager for the public NTP project. This "herding cats"-like task requires a vast amount of patience and knowledge and it seems that he has that and much more! Some of the cats are rather big and fancy and I am always puzzled to learn how the "PM" manages to maintain releases and organizational things single- handedly." Harlan has been active in the public domain software and open-source communities since 1976. When he is away from the keyboard, he enjoys cooking (especially baking and grilling) and photography.
Speaker:
Harlan Stenn - Network Time Protocol (NTP) Project Manager, President of Network Time Foundation