Saturn

Saturn is a tiny go client that uses UDP to watch time across servers. A single saturn instance should be the master instance and all other instances should be passed a --master-addr with the address for the master. All communication is done over UDP on the --listen-addr. BOTH masters and slaves need to have the UDP port open. The default port is 4123.

Since each instance operates over UDP a shared key is used to "verify" traffic the secret should be the same across all nodes and is passed via --hmac-key.

Time offset is determined using a multi-round system. The slave sends its current time to the master. The master replies with its time and the offset. The slave then respondes one more time with its time and the original offset. This process can be repeated n times to achieve greater accuracy. The master takes the 80th percentile of the RTTs when calculating the offset of the slave in order to account for anomalies in Internet networks.

Rounds

The number of back-and-forth offset calculations can be passed with --rounds and defaults to 5. With 5 rounds, I've noticed less than 100 millisecond variance. If you're just trying to make sure a server isn't 3 seconds off, this is perfectly fine.

Note: The --rounds count only needs to be configured on the master.

Threshold

When a slave is over the threshold passed with --threshold a warning will be printed to stdout:

~ WARN -- slave offset is over threshold -- name="10.42.0.9" offset="-4.984391125000001"

This follows the format of llog messages. There will be more configurable options in the future.

ProtoBuf

The communication is done with protobufs and you can find the protobuf files in the proto file.

To generate new go files based on the proto files run:

go generate ./...

Version

The running saturn with --version prints the version number. This is only supported in releases unless you set the version when compiling:

go build -ldflags "-X github.com/levenlabs/saturn/config.version 'myversion'" ./...

Example Offset Calculation

- Slave is 4 seconds behind Master -
- n = 2 -

Slave       Packet Transit Time         Master
----------------------------------------------
Time 20   -------- 2 seconds -------->
                                       Time 26
          <-------- 1 second --------- Offset -6
Time 23
Offset -3 -------- 3 seconds -------->
                                       Time 30
                                       Offset -7
First RTT = |-6 - -3| = 3
Second RTT = |30 - 26| = 4
Total RTTs = 7
Total Offsets = (-6 + -7) = -13

Slave offset = (-13 + (7 / 2)) / 2 = -4.75

You'll notice this is 0.75 second off, but keep in mind this was done with seconds and not with milliseconds.

Todo

• Instead of comparing every server to the master we should compare the servers to the other servers
• POST a message when over threshold instead of just logging