svn commit: r289421 - in head/etc: . mtree ntp

[Cy Schubert]

In message <1451491490.1369.41.camel at freebsd.org>, Ian Lepore writes:
> On Wed, 2015-12-30 at 04:50 -0800, Colin Percival wrote:
> > On 10/16/15 07:04, Cy Schubert wrote:
> > >   Add default leap-seconds file. This should help ntp networks get
> > > the
> > >   leap second date correct
> > >   
> > > Added:
> > >   head/etc/ntp/
> > >   head/etc/ntp/Makefile   (contents, props changed)
> > >   head/etc/ntp/leap-seconds   (contents, props changed)
> > 
> > So... is someone going to be keeping this file up to date?  We seem
> > to have
> > the same information in contrib/tzdata/leapseconds (which is being
> > kept up
> > to date -- thank you edwin and delphij!) but having this file in
> > /etc/ntp/
> > being out of date is making ntpd refuse to start.
> > 
> 
> I vaguely remember warning that something like this was likely to
> happen.  Turning on leapfile processing by default without an already
> -in-place mechanism to keep the file up to date was a bad idea.  There
> was some mumbling about a mechanism, but nobody wrote any code.
> 
> Even if the mechanism existed, I think defaulting to using the leapfile
> is wrong.  It's a thing that needs care and feeding or it causes
> problems, and thus it's a thing that should only be enabled by admins
> who know about the care and feeding aspect (an automatic fetch
> mechanism doesn't help much if there are firewalls blocking the fetch,
> for example).

The original idea was to update the file twice a year. Just before 
Christmas des@ suggested an alternative approach of fetching an update 
weekly or monthly because some upstream ntp servers not using the correct 
leap seconds and hosting the file locally would be more reliable. I've cc'd 
you on my last reply to des@ this morning.


-- 
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at komquats.com> or <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX:  <cy at FreeBSD.org>   Web:  http://www.FreeBSD.org

	The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.