ntpd configutration -- a small suggestion from the peanut gallery

[Per Hedeland]

On 2019-06-06 00:34, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> 
> In message <11728008-40bb-4ff6-5a93-5ebf28ce4735 at hedeland.org>,
> Per Hedeland <per at hedeland.org> wrote:
> 
>>> Yes.  Here is the exact quote from the current man page for ntpd:
>>>
>>>        -g, --panicgate
>>>                Allow the first adjustment to be Big.  This option may appear
>> an
>>>                unlimited number of times.
>>>
>>>                Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if the
>>>                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>>                offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by default
>> .
>>>
>>> So either I need new glasses or else that part underlined above is just plai
>> n
>>> wrong.  Because even after my ntpd died several times, I was unable to find
>>> -any- message telling me that ntpd had chosen suicide, let alone what the
>>> reasons for that might have been.  At least not in /var/log/messages.
>>
>> I know that the underlined part *used to* be correct, since I have
>> seen those messages in the distant past (on FreeeBSD they would indeed
>> be in /var/log/messages, but that is OS-dependant). I don't remember
>> the exact wording though, and doing a quick test, I can confirm your
>> observation - nothing at all is logged by the ntpd version included in
>> FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE when it commits suicide due to the offset
>> exceeding the panic threshold. So I guess the logging was lost at some
>> point.
> 
> Thank you for confirming.  so I now know that I am not crazy... or at
> least not *entirely* crazy. :-)
> 
>> https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1130
>> https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2410
>>
>> Unfortunately the activity seen in those bug reports, including not
>> even applying a provided patch, is probably typical for the
>> maintenance of the "reference implementation" these days.
> 
> Well, there is the reference code, and then there is the FreeBSD version
> thereof.

True of course, but AFAIK the FreeBSD developers (like most OS
distribution developers) are (understandably) not very keen on having
local fixes to "contributed" software, at least when such fixes don't
address FreeBSD-specific issues. This does seem to me to be a worthy
case for an exception, though.

> Anyway, I already filed FreeBSD a PR on this:
> 
>     https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=238352
> 
> I will now attach to that the links you provided also, and then just
> hope for the best.

You have my support.:-)

--Per