On Sun, 30 Oct 2011, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:

 another that attempts to use ntpdate to check the difference between the
 clocks on spamassassin2.zones.apache.org and spamassassin.zones.apache.org
 and warn if the difference gets "too great" (which is yet to be
 intelligently defined).

Thanks for doing this. As for testing it, I'm hoping the time skew is a unique situation that never repeats because I don't see a better way than you devised.

Overall, though, theoretically Infra fixed ntpupdate on the master zone for that box so even if they changed the time, my guess is there ntpupdate would fix it very quickly.

Agreed. Checking for clock drift in an NTP environment is inherently kinda silly. :)

And unfortunately, purposefully changing the time would change all the zones on that box.

So it's not something I would want to even ask to be tested on a production box.

Yeah, there's that, too. However, if the temporary test clock drift was 10 minutes that would be enough to test the monitor and (he says hopefully) not materially affect the other zones - which, I point out, were affected when the clock was skewed on its own earlier, right?

However, I don't know that your system for time skew check will work without the zones1 running ntpd. Isn't it currently just return 0 skew because it can't contact zones?

If there wasn't an NTP daemon available on the target host it would explicitly say no time daemon could be contacted.

I suppose there should be a test for that situation, as one way this could happen again is ntpd on one box or the other dies and the clocks start drifting... I'll add a check for that.

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