[Q] Best location of ntpd driftfile ?

[Charles Swiger]

On Mar 21, 2004, at 1:30 PM, Stefan A. Deutscher wrote:
>   setting up ntpd, I find that its default location for the drift file
> is /etc/ntp.drift.

Right, and that is probably the best location, too.

> In a way it is part of the configuration an may well belong in /etc, on
> the other hand I'd rather just have files in /etc which _I_ modify.

At one point (15 years ago :-), some people used to modify the contents 
of ntp.drift by hand.

This was for machines which were not connected to a network; by keeping 
track of the system time drift against an external time reference 
source over the course of a few weeks, one could compute the right 
value for ntp.drift and then run ntpd to correct that drift.

> I would expect the content of ntpd.drift to vary over time,

ntp.drift normally converges and stabilizes after a while (a few days 
to a few weeks), unless the hardware clock is bad.

> and somehow I would have expected it to belong in the /var part of the 
> hierarchy, but 'man hier' does not offer any serious evidence (should 
> it be
> /var/db/ntp.dift)?

Hmm.  Well, ntpd predates the notion of /var, but you could put the 
drift file under there if you wanted to.  I think keeping DNS zone 
files under /var/named makes a lot more sense than under /etc/named, 
for instance, but I wouldn't move ntp.drift out of /etc myself.

-- 
-Chuck