Re: [gentoo-dev] logging in openntpd 20080406-r3+

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 9:15 PM, Paul B. Henson <henson@×××.org> wrote:
> I was unable to come to an agreement with the current maintainer of the
> ebuild on this design, and would like some general feedback from the larger
> community of developers on this topic.

Thank you for your explanation of the issues here, I found it quite interesting.

I think I was the original user who complained about the boot delays.
I was surprised a few times by openntpd behavior.

- Without -s, it can take a *very* long time to get close to an
acceptable time error, whereas my initial expectation was that
"starting my ntpd should fix the time error fairly quickly". But for
me this, this is partly about starting ntpd while the machine is
online, not just at boot.

- Second, with -s, the boot delays can be quite long. I'm pretty sure
I've seen delays that are quite a bit longer than 15s, probably in the
case where there's no network or maybe where DNS doesn't resolve well;
in any case, when you're trying to debug issues in a data center
environment, waiting for a bunch of machines to come up is not much
fun. (Or when you've had a machine go down and you're waiting to see
if it comes up again.)

Now, for my use case, it is not all that important that the time error
is minimized before resuming the boot process, but I really wanted to
minimize boot delays.

Also, I'm really not sure how the change to logging to stderr/file and
running in debug mode helps with the boot delays.

Cheers,

Dirkjan