To: ntp@ni.umd.edu
CC: gtroxel@bbn.com
Subject: ALPHA release of Time Surveying package
--text follows this line--
I have released an alpha version of my "Time Surveying" package,
developed as part of my doctoral research at the MIT Laboratory for
Computer Science.  This package consists of programs to analyze and
present the additional data logged by xntp3.4h and up when
"GDT_SURVEYING" is defined.  Using the package, a Time Surveyor may
gain insight into:

 how well a machine was synchronized
 how stable its local oscillator was
 the delay behavior of networks to various remote clocks
 how well the remote clocks kept time
 the degree of systematic offsets of various remote clocks

The central idea of Time Surveying is to decouple the effects of the
synchronization algorithm being run from the data recorded.  I define
the "local oscillator" as a count of ticks of the crystal oscillator,
and the "system clock" as something which accumulates those ticks and
also is modified by a time synchronization algorithm.  The package
produces views of remote clocks with respect to the local oscillator,
and views of the system clock with respect to the local oscillator.
It produces "wedge" plots of offsets vs. delay, and also wedge plots
of offsets with respect to the local oscillator vs. delay.  These
plots give much insight into synchronization performance.

Currently the available documentation consists of my Ph.D. thesis and
brief instructions of how to compile and run the code.

I have recently compiled the source code under SunOS 4.1.2, and
previous versions under Ultrix 4.2A and NetBSD 0.9.  I expect that it
will compile with little trouble under any BSD variant that has gcc.
Patches for other machines are welcome.

The package consists of two files available by anonymous FTP.

/thyme.lcs.mit.edu:/pub/time-surveying-src.tgz
  -rw-r--r--  1 11067      716148 Oct 20 14:14 time-surveying-src.tgz
  (gzipped tar file of patches and source)

/thyme.lcs.mit.edu:/pub/time-surveying-doc.tar
  -rw-r--r--  1 11067     6492160 Oct 20 14:16 time-surveying-doc.tar
  (tar file of gzipped ps files for my thesis)

If you retrieve these files, also get the following file, which is
necessary for examining data produced by the analysis program.

thyme.lcs.mit.edu:/pub:xplot-0.78.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--  1 11002      184313 Oct 20 13:45 xplot-0.78.tar.gz

Future versions of this package may be on a different FTP server.

	Greg Troxel
	<gtroxel@bbn.com>
