[ntp:questions] ntpd, boot time, and hot plugging

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Mon Feb 7 00:14:51 UTC 2005


At 9:43 PM -0200 2005-02-06, Alain wrote:

>  This requires that I have another daemon taking care of this one! Just
>  to see if I have to Start ntpd -g again... If it makes sense for you,
>  I cannot see it. I undertsand that I am just a newcomer and as such my
>  opinions have little weight. I am conciouns that here I am just a user
>  and as such I have the priviledge of asking silly questions :)

	At some point, the software is going to run into a problem that 
it can't correct.  It's going to be faced with some sort of input 
that it doesn't know how to deal with.  In that situation, what do 
you do?

	Do you freak out and set the clock back to zero, in the hopes 
that something will break really, really badly and someone will 
notice?  What if they don't notice?  Do you do some other horribly 
destructive things, in hopes that someone will notice?  What if 
you've done every destructive thing you can think of (including 
wiping and doing a low-level format of all attached hard drives), and 
still no one notices?  What happens if the system that fails is part 
of a nuclear missile guidance or launching system?  Do you really 
want them doing destructive things on their own, hoping to be able to 
catch the attention of the operator?

	Do you log an error in the syslog and exit?  This is the approach 
taken by most Unix-style daemons, and part of the deal is that you've 
got to watch them to make sure that this hasn't happened.  There's 
little difference here between how ntpd works as any other.  If 
you're not doing this kind of monitoring already for all the other 
important processes on the system, that's a much bigger problem that 
you've got to resolve.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.



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