In an effort to make ntpd a little more Solaris friendly and integrated, I am looking at doing some work with it regarding privs and smf. I've already got the smf_maintain_instance thing going, (thanks David, Darren, Ranaud and Tony for your help!) and I was looking at how ntpd should react if it cannot find a server to synchronize with.
You see, there are a couple of cases here. First when ntpd starts, it might take a while synchronize the clock. I presume that if the start method hasn't exited, then the service is flagged as still in startup. But, what should ntpd do if it loses contact with the servers for an extended length of time? My thought was to have a threshold such that if the clock has not been synchronized for longer than the threshold, the ntpd service would be marked as in a degraded mode. Is that the right thing to do? Again, I presume that to go into degraded mode you use smf_degrade_instance and smf_restore_instance to come out. Is that right? Are there any consequences to going into degraded mode? Is there anything that informs the admin that a service has become degraded? Should there be a limit to how often a service goes into and out of degraded mode? Thanks for your help. -- blu "When Congress started Daylight Savings Time earlier, did they even consider what affect an extra hour of daylight would have on global warming? Well, did they?" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Ph:877-259-7345, Em:brian.utterback-at-ess-you-enn-dot-kom
