Hi Bdale, thank you for your input! Using openntpd sounds very good. Who is the person to make the decision?
Best, Thiemo On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Bdale Garbee <bd...@gag.com> wrote: > Dmitrijs Ledkovs <x...@debian.org> writes: > >> Servers that rarely (re)configure network or boot, can also setup cron >> to call to ntpdate or install an NTP client daemon when they are first >> configured. > > FWIW, calling ntpdate from cron is a *horrible* idea. > > Since I agree that having time sync be a default part of a Debian > installation would be a good idea, let me put a few thoughts down here > and articulate what I think we should do. > > On a system like a server with at least one fixed-configuration network > interface, unless the hardware clock has completely failed, the initial > system time won't be grossly off, and just installing an ntp daemon is a > better plan. Even if the hardware clock *has* failed, Debian's ntp > packaging uses the -g option to the daemon by default, so that once the > daemon has talked to enough peers/servers to know what time it is, it > will always slew the clock one time no matter how far off it is at > daemon launch. > > On a client system like a notebook that only has dynamic network > connectivity, and may not be on the net at all at boot, the best > strategy seem to be to rely on the hardware clock at boot and only worry > about network time sync when there's networking available. For the past > couple years, I've been using the openntpd package on my notebook, which > has an if-up.d script that does a force-reload on each network interface > up event, and in practice I've been quite happy with the results. > > I looked at chrony briefly several years ago and wasn't impressed, but > I'm peripherally aware that it has been worked on quite a bit since then > and probably deserves another look. It claims to have been specifically > written to handle well the case of a system that's not always on the net. > > Looking at the size of the packages, ntp is largest due to the inclusion > of drivers for various reference clocks, etc. Chrony is also a very > large package, ntpdate is much larger than you'd expect, and openntpd is > quite small by comparison to either ntp or chrony. Here are the Size: > and Installed-Size: values for each based on the current sid packages: > > ntp 559578 1226 > chrony 395400 743 > ntpdate 81930 227 > openntpd 64068 103 > > I care a lot about the size of our base install, and openntpd seems to > do everything I need just fine as far as I can tell. So, without going > off to study chrony which I really don't know at all, if I were making > this decision, I'd be inclined to make openntpd standard, avoid ntpdate > entirely, and assume users who really want to run stratum-1 NTP servers > know how to install and optimally configure ntp. > > Bdale -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
