My fight with ntp autokey authentication
After fighting several hours with ntp and its autokey support, I found out that it was a bug in ntpd.
It doesn’t correctly check for errno and as a result packets get dropped completely. I’ve added a fix for this issue to net-misc/ntp-4.2.0.20040617-r1 and included a patch (based on the one from www.ecsirt.net) that allows to override the hostname used by ntpd, especially useful for autokey authentication. Also I’ve merged some IPV6 fixes from upstream developers.
If you have a couple of hours and don’t mind reading source code to get good documentation I can recommend you to take a peek at ntp and its autokey support! I promise you, it’s hours of fun…