[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#352610: Please create a udeb for ntpdate

Frans Pop elendil at planet.nl
Sat Aug 19 14:47:44 UTC 2006


On Saturday 19 August 2006 15:50, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>  - It basically seems to work and is very small.

Which is a big plus.

>  - Somtimes rdate doesn't work, but this applies both to busybox and
>    the stand-alone variant.  I get errors like "69.25.96.13 did not
>    send the complete time" from time to time and when I try again it
>    works (other people get this too, see #352777).  I don't know if
>    that's a real problem with the rdate server (but I tried several),
>    the protocol or the implementation(s).

Seems this could be worked around easily by just retrying a few times if 
that error is returned (until it is fixed).

Is there a time-out when it really cannot connect to a server?

>  - I couldn't find something like pool.ntp.org, i.e. a generic name we
>    can use behind which many servers can be found.
>    http://tf.nist.gov/service/its.htm has a list of rdate servers but
>    there's no alias for all of them.  We could create a
>    rdate.debian.org (or .net) and ask the NIST people which servers we
>    can add.

Installations are rare enough that just using a fixed address also seems 
an option. You could even add one or two alternates in case the first is 
down for some reason.
A bit weird that the only servers seem to be in the US...


We mainly need to determine how we are going to use rdate:
- for all installations;
- only for some (sub)arches like nlsu;
- only if difference between system date/time and rdate date/time is
  greater than x.

Seems to me there needs to be a link with clock-setup as I guess rdate 
would set the time to UTC. So either clock-setup would need to reset the 
clock if "local time" is selected, or it would have to default to UTC 
too.
We could even use rdate to guess if clock is set to local time or UTC 
based on the difference between system time and rdate.
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