[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH] 335 Stop and disable conflicting time&date services

Simo Sorce simo at redhat.com
Thu Nov 15 14:22:23 UTC 2012


On Thu, 2012-11-15 at 12:34 +0100, Martin Kosek wrote:
> Fedora 16 introduced chrony as default client time&date synchronization
> service:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ChronyDefaultNTP
> Thus, there may be people already using chrony as their time and date
> synchronization service before installing IPA.
> 
> However, installing IPA server or client on such machine may lead to
> unexpected behavior, as the IPA installer would configure ntpd and leave
> the machine with both ntpd and chronyd enabled. However, since the OS
> does not allow both chronyd and ntpd to be running concurrently and chronyd
> has the precedence, ntpd would not be run on that system at all.
> 
> Make sure, that user is warned when trying to install IPA on such
> system and is given a possibility to either not to let IPA configure
> ntpd at all or to let the installer stop and disable chronyd.
> 
> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/2974

This looks a bit backwards to me.

The IPA server can only configure ntpd because it configures it to serve
time to the clients. So on a server force_ntpd should be the default and
the install should automatically shutdown crony.

On clients we may give a choice, but then we should not stop, we should
instead configure the one tool the admin wants to use and point it to
the server, because time synchronization is critical. Not syncing time
is basically not an option so our default behavior must be to make sure
one of the time tool is properly configured and require a force flag if
the admin wants to 'not' configure a time sync tool.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York




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