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[questions] Re: Please Document the Peer Command (and Let the World Know How to Use It)



I think you meant pool, not peer, in the subject...[more interleaved]

On 26/05/2022 22:22, Frank Wayne wrote:

It is mentioned on the Access Control Commands and Options page (https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/accopt.html#restrict), but there's no reason someone would think to look for it there. Someone trying to use pool for the first time with "restrict default nopeer" is presented with a .PEER. refid in ntpq, but is offered no clue as to why no peers actually show up.

If they hadn't looked there, they shouldn't have include a restrict command in the first place.


The first article (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-ntp-for-use-in-the-ntp-pool-project-on-ubuntu-16-04) is actually how to stop ntp from using pool. The author literally instructs the user to remove the pool commands in the default ntp.conf and replace them with server commands.

Which is quite correct in the context of the article, which is about becoming a member of the pool, not a user. You don't want an incestuous situation where pool members are getting their time from the pool.


Before I move on, it is interesting to note that -- as this "documentation" describes --  Ubuntu's official repository provides a default ntp.conf that contains the following pool commands (that the "documentation" instructs us to remove):

pool 0.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
pool 1.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
pool 2.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
pool 3.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
pool ntp.ubuntu.com

This would, I think, produce as many as twenty time sources for the daemon. Mine (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) created seventeen. In my experience, using over a dozen server


The way I read the documentation, the number actually used is capped. However, I suspect this it he result of converting a server configuration for using the pool, to the, newer, pool way, without understanding the difference properly. Using "server" each line would only pick one member of the pool specified, and repeated calls on the same pool would likely get the same one over and over.

why would there be no guidance for the most prominent distributors of the daemon to write sane configurations?

People who package for Linux distributions often aren't power users of the packages. Although the following example isn't NTP, one also gets the problem of copying and pasting, which propagates misunderstandings, when people who should have read the documentation in detail have just copied someone else's solution, with minor tweak. Where I see this is configuration for access internet telephony service providers in the Asterisk PABX. They are invariable half nonsense.

Anyway, I guess the real problem here is that the only maintained documentation is reference documentation, and there isn't a good set of cook book documentation.

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