[Fwd: Re: [ntp:questions] Re: drifting on crystal]

Marc Brett marc at fordson.demon.co.uk
Fri Jan 14 11:24:13 UTC 2005


On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 23:39:24 -0500, "Richard B. Gilbert"
<rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote:

>Alain wrote:

>I believe that the presumption is that ntpd was restarted, either by 
>itself or because the machine was rebooted.   In that case you don't 
>really want the daily average as a starting value, you want the best 
>available approximation to the correction for right now which would be 
>the most recent recorded value.

If it's true that drift values cycle over a period of one day, perhaps ntpd
should be recording, say, 24 drift values, once every hour.  When ntpd is
restarted, it could read the drift value which pertains to the current time of
day.

How much would this improve performance?  Confuse users?

Oh, and while we're at it, can we move the default location of ntp.drift out of
/etc/ and into /var/ (or /var/something/)?  /etc/ is meant for configuration
files, not rapidly changing stuff like clock drift.



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