[ntp:questions] Servers with identical ntp.conf keep falling out of sync

Ry malayter at gmail.com
Thu Jan 18 13:40:43 UTC 2007


Maarten Wiltink wrote:
> Almost. People come from the Windows world with the idea that
> 'setup.exe, Next, Next, Next, Next, Finish' is as hard as it's
> allowed to be.

They also come with the expectation that software be
forward-compatible, and mostly backward-compatible. Upgrading to a new
version shouldn't wreck your configuration. Changing the meaning of a
configuration keyword - especially one related to security - is a
astonishingly bad idea.

This is one critical area of software development that MS and other
closed-source vendors get mostly right. And one in which much open
source software fails miserably. For example, there are many thousands
of hackable open-source bulletin board sites out there right now. Not
because the holes haven't been fixed by the developers, mind you - the
holes were fixed years ago. But the same developers provide absolutely
no workable process to get from version 1.1 to version 2.0 without
throwing most everything away and starting over from scratch.




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