Hello and good day. Unessential intro: My NTP systems are intentionally restricted from mailing out so I am posting the bug on the email address instead of using sendbug. And I'm new to BSD world, even though I have more than a bit of experience with Linux and stuff. I also did not find a bug reporting mechanism on OpenNTPD (except of the portable part, which is not what I have here).
*** Actual Problem *** I have found out (by merely watching "ntpctl -sa" on server and on client) that ntpd (wrongly) claims to be stratum 1 right after starting, during the period when it is unsynchronized. It appears that it does serve NTP at some point during that unsync interval and it claims to be stratum 1. This misleads downstream clients to pick it as favorite and assign a long refresh interval to it. My configuration is OpenBSD 6.7, recently upgraded from initial install of 6.6. Syspatch returns immediately without any action so I suppose it is running the latest versions. I suppose the above description is enough for someone who knows the inside of the OpenNTPD to identify the problem (if there is one). I think the server should return a very low stratum if unsync or maybe it should reject entirely any request unless it is sync and stable (at which time it should report a proper stratum). If additional detail is needed, I can try to add a cleaner cut with captured commands output. Or if nobody more able than me will pick this, maybe I'll push my coding abilities to the challenge, read the source and suggest directly a patch. Thank you for caring, Florin
