RCng/NTP Catch-22

[Kevin Oberman]

I have run into a messy issue with ntp on a V5 or current system. I have
kludged around it, but the problem really needs to be fixed.

ntpd uses symlinked devices to talk to the reference clock (if there is
one).
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  10 Jul  1 14:36 /dev/pps1 -> /dev/cuaa1
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  10 Jul  1 14:36 /dev/true1 -> /dev/cuaa1

While I really wish ntpd did not do this, it does and it's in the base
system. 

Since /etc/rc.d/ntpd contains:
BEFORE: LOGIN
and /etc/rc.d/devfs contains:
REQUIRE: LOGIN
I don't see a clean way to create the symlinks at boot time. If the
devices are not present when ntp starts, it never looks again.

I have kludged this by adding the symlinks in the ntpd script, but this
is really ugly. There should be a better way of doing it. Ideally, ntp
should read the device(s) to use from ntp.conf (and quit overloading
the loopback address space while we are at it). Barring this, there
needs to be a way of getting th devices created before nptd is started.

Any of the RCng folks have any suggestions?
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634