On Sep 23, 2012, at 6:13 AM, David L. Craig wrote:
On 12Sep23:0208-0700, Rick Thomas wrote:On Sep 22, 2012, at 6:51 AM, Camaleón wrote:Anyway, no NTP daemon should crash because of skewed time; one thing is that it refushes to sync (which can be fine, and should log this fact so the admin can make the proper measures) but a different thing is completely killing the service.That issue has been argued on the NTP developer mailing lists. Crashing the daemon is Dave Mills' way of telling the admin that something is badly broken here and needs to be fixed. Several developers (myself included) disagreed with him at the time, but he was adamant on the subject. So that's the way it is.There must be at least one patch available and maintained that can be applied to modify the official distribution's behavior if multiple developers disagree with this behavior. Where should one look?
The final outcome was that -- some years later -- the "-g" option was added to ntpd. Quoting from "man 8 ntpd":
-g Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if
the offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by
default. This option allows the time to be set to any
value without restriction; however, this can happen only
once. If the threshold is exceeded after that, ntpd will
exit with a message to the system log. This option can be
used with the -q and -x options.
This was added to allow closing out support for ntpdate, but it also satisfied most of the developers who felt that crashing was an ungraceful way of delivering a message.
It works for me. Rick