[pkg-ntp-maintainers] ntpdate invocation

[Bdale Garbee]

peter_e at gmx.net (Peter Eisentraut) writes:

> Looking down the bug list of ntpdate, nobody is happy about when it is 
> invoked.  Clearly, with dial-up and dynamic interfaces, running it at 
> boot time is just a shot in the dark.  So, I'm proposing that we change 
> this around, eliminate the init script and run it only from ifup.d.

That probably makes sense.

The only potential problem areas I can think of are if ntpd starts before any
network interfaces have come up and thus before ntpdate tries to run the first
time, and what happens if an interface comes up and ntpdate tries to run while
ntpd is already running.  In both cases, I would expect ntpdate to fail, but
how noisy/annoying that failure is might matter to some users.  Without
actually trying your scripts, it wasn't immediately obvious to me what the
consequences of those cases will be.  Do you know?

Bdale