ntpd configutration -- a small suggestion from the peanut gallery

[Per Hedeland]

On 2019-06-05 23:25, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> 
> In message <alpine.BSF.2.20.1906051648560.44637 at fledge.watson.org>,
> doug at fledge.watson.org wrote:
> 
>>> Did I just miss those ntpd death messages somehow?
>>
>> I'm not sure. Somewhere in the ntp docs it says ntpd will not change the time if
>> the offset is too large...
> 
> Yes.  Here is the exact quote from the current man page for ntpd:
> 
>       -g, --panicgate
>               Allow the first adjustment to be Big.  This option may appear an
>               unlimited number of times.
> 
>               Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system log if the
>                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>               offset exceeds the panic threshold, which is 1000 s by default.
> 
> So either I need new glasses or else that part underlined above is just plain
> wrong.  Because even after my ntpd died several times, I was unable to find
> -any- message telling me that ntpd had chosen suicide, let alone what the
> reasons for that might have been.  At least not in /var/log/messages.

I know that the underlined part *used to* be correct, since I have
seen those messages in the distant past (on FreeeBSD they would indeed
be in /var/log/messages, but that is OS-dependant). I don't remember
the exact wording though, and doing a quick test, I can confirm your
observation - nothing at all is logged by the ntpd version included in
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE when it commits suicide due to the offset
exceeding the panic threshold. So I guess the logging was lost at some
point.

https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1130
https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2410

Unfortunately the activity seen in those bug reports, including not
even applying a provided patch, is probably typical for the
maintenance of the "reference implementation" these days.

--Per