Wednesday 22 October 2014

Re: ntp by default on servers in Vivid

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 02:51:56PM +0100, Robie Basak wrote:
> I'd like to seed ntp in both server and cloud-image in Vivid. Servers
> should maintain the correct time by default. Please make any objections
> now.
>
> Right now, ntpdate is seeded in minimal. It makes little sense to have
> both ntpdate and ntp installed.

Historically, ntpd would refuse to change the system time beyond a small
amount, so ntpdate was run in the initscripts for ntpd to make sure that
ntpd could keep things synchronized from then on. Is this still the case?
is this smallish amount of time configurable?

It only makes sense to install ntpd if it will also be configured. Are we
going to use pool.ntp.org? This may work well enough for "simple" uses,
but does allow any member of pool.ntp.org to completely mess up times of
potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of users.

Will it be easy enough for an organization to override the configuration
in each of the use cases you've described?

Thanks