Changes to Network Protocols

This section describes the changes made to network protocols.

IPv6

IPv6 is a major enhancement of the Internet Protocol which breaks the IPv4 limitations, particularly the address range limitation. IPv6 also simplifies the IP headers for optimizing implementations.

IPv6 and IPv4 stacks co-exist in version 5.0 of the ChorusOS operating system.

For more information on support for IPv6, refer to "The ChorusOS system and IP" in the ChorusOS 5.0 System Administrator's Guide.

For a complete guide to migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, refer to "Transitioning From IPv4 to IPv6" in the Solaris System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

The new NTP feature provides a set of daemons and commands that enable you to synchronize the dates of different ChorusOS systems. The date is synchronized within a client/server architecture. A ChorusOS system may request the date or provide the date to other systems.

The Network Time Protocol Daemon (ntpd)

The ntpd daemon can run as a server or as a client. The server feature provides a reference clock available to all systems on the network. The client feature is used to compute a clock according to other sources and to keep the system clock synchronized.

The ntpq Command

This command enables you retrieve or to set the ntpd configuration dynamically. For example, the list of reference clocks used by servers for synchronization can be modified dynamically with ntpq

The ntptrace Command

ntptrace determines the source from which a particular NTP server gets its time and follows the chain of NTP servers back to their master time source.

The ntpdate command

ntpdate enables you to retrieve and set the system time using NTP. Requests made by ntpdate are in unicast mode. Although ntpdate is not the best way to request the time periodically, or to maintain a synchronized date (since it is a command) it can be useful when used with a mechanism like a cron tab.