On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, David Malone wrote:
The local clock should only be configured on a single server in a
NTP domain that might be disconnected from the rest of the tree.
Since the default config is a client config, it doesn't make sense
to have the local clock configured. Even if it was a server config,
it still wouldn't make sense, because it is only useful if a single
server has it configured.
I do not see the point in removing it, it helps to keep the ntpd daemon
running if for some reason it loses the "real" ntp servers.
It's definitely a misconfiguration to ship it by default. If you
have many clients all with a local clock configured, then, when
disconnected, they all just follow themselves rather than following
the clock on a server. If you have it configured on several servers
you end up with some clients following each of the servers, but
they won't all stay together unless you're lucky. For this use of
the local clock, you only want one local clock per island that might
become disconnected.
This is handled by having different local clocks in different strata.
I only use 2 such strata -- 1 for server and another for all clients.
But this is not so easy to set up as a default.
ref8 FreeBSD cluster machines have the new ntp.conf, so they have the
local clock with the same stratum and this misconfiguration is getting
some official testing :-). It is probably actually unofficial, due
mergemaster blowing away the old primitive ntp.conf which is still
used on other FreeBSD cluster machines. This seems to break the
server config generally -- ntptrace on ref8* hangs after localhost
while ntptrace on ref7-amd64 hangs after hub.
Bruce
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