On Sep 23, 2012, at 6:13 AM, David L. Craig wrote:

On 12Sep23:0208-0700, Rick Thomas wrote:

On Sep 22, 2012, at 6:51 AM, Camaleón wrote:

Anyway, no NTP daemon should crash because of skewed time;
one thing is that it refushes to sync (which can be fine,
and should log this fact so the admin can make the proper
measures) but a different thing is completely killing the
service.

That issue has been argued on the NTP developer mailing lists.
Crashing the daemon is Dave Mills' way of telling the admin
that something is badly broken here and needs to be fixed.
Several developers (myself included) disagreed with him at the
time, but he was adamant on the subject.  So that's the way it
is.

There must be at least one patch available and maintained
that can be applied to modify the official distribution's
behavior if multiple developers disagree with this
behavior.  Where should one look?


The final outcome was that -- some years later -- the "-g" option was added to ntpd. Quoting from "man 8 ntpd":

 -g Normally,  ntpd  exits  with a message to the system log if
    the offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s  by
    default.   This  option  allows  the  time to be set to any
    value without restriction; however, this  can  happen  only
    once.   If  the threshold is exceeded after that, ntpd will
    exit with a message to the system log.  This option can  be
    used with the -q and -x options.

This was added to allow closing out support for ntpdate, but it also satisfied most of the developers who felt that crashing was an ungraceful way of delivering a message.

It works for me.

Rick



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/d236f7c7-3f91-403b-a854-c70f22c7e...@pobox.com

Reply via email to