Nicolas Williams wrote: >On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 01:01:37PM +0800, Darren Reed wrote: > > >>Or if the NTP server is rebooting or.... >> >> > >You should have more than one. OK, network partitions... > > > >>Come on, lets get real - this is ntpdate. >> >>If ntpdate fails, it shouldn't be putting NTP into maintanance at all. >> >> > >As long as the clock did not get too far out of sync -- farther than you >want to tolerate. > >ntpdate has a timeout option. Perhaps the service should make this >configurable, as well as whether to proceed if ntpdate timeour or go >into maintenance. > >
Yup, and the default timeout for ntpdate, according to its man page, is 1 second (even shorter than the 3 seconds I mentioned.) >>The idea here is to start up xntpd which is quite capable of handling >>the task that ntpdate is there to do, in its own time. >> >> > >But you may not want to have your apps start if the clock is too skewed. > > While I can understand that in principle, in reality, unless you are going to shut your system down because xntpd loses touch with a time server (and thus the system drifts), time (to an application) is generally not that important. It is nice to avoid repeated time stamps (through slowing down a system that has a time in the future) but if something really cares about this, it'll needs to do more than just rely on ntpdate being run. Darren
