[ntp:questions] Should ntpd log failure to syslog?

Richard B. Gilbert rgilbert88 at comcast.net
Fri Dec 12 02:08:44 UTC 2008


Hal Murray wrote:
>> That's why you normally configure four, five, or seven servers.  These 
>> "magic numbers" protect you against the failure of one, two, or three 
>> servers respectively.  "Failure" can mean anything from not responding 
>> to responding with the wrong year!
> 
> That's missing the point I was trying to make.  Let me try again.
> 
> If you have a system with redundancy, you also need a layer of
> monitoring to see if it is working correctly.  Otherwise, when
> something breaks, the system will take advantage of the redundancy
> and keep working.  If nobody knows about the problem, it won't get
> fixed.  After a while something else breaks.  Eventually you run
> out of working redundancy and the system stops working.
> 
> There are all sorts of reasons why NTP servers might stop working.
> 
> The RAID example was a good one.
> 

I think you are assuming here, that the servers will fail one by one 
with no one noticing or correcting the problems.  This scenario seems 
rather unlikely to me.  Any publicly available server has hundreds or 
even thousands of clients keeping an eye on it.  If it goes belly up the 
failure will surely be noticed.




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