On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 5:46 AM, John Long <codeb...@inbox.lv> wrote: > Does portable NTPD use a drift file? I didn't see one in the previous > version and a new install of 5.7p1 doesn't seem to have one either. I didn't > see any discussion of a drift file in the manpage for ntpd nor for ntpd.conf > in the portable version, though it is mentioned in the man pages for the > OpenBSD version.
It is mentioned in the ntpd(8) man page at the bottom, though I should fix the the portable version to adjust the manpage to point where it actually gets configured for installation. Some packagers have already been patching this for their distributions. By default, it should get written to: LOCALSTATEDIR "/db/ntpd.drift" which translates to $(prefix)/var/db/ntpd.drift > Also, what is the purpose of /var/empty/ntp in the portable version? It's > empty ;) Thanks for bringing that up. This is a privilege-separation directory that the unprivileged ntpd processes chroot to on startup. It is intentionally empty and unwritable by the unprivileged processes. Having this directory empty and unwritable prevents the processes from having access to any files or file system privileges that they do not need to do their jobs. Since /var/empty might not exist, e.g. Debian does not provide it, your OS's package may have altered the privilege separation user directory to be somewhere else, like '/var/run/openntpd'. But, that should also be empty and unwritable. That said, I made a mistake in having the installer suggest using /var/empty/ntp by default, since one may have other processes using /var/empty for privilege separation. I'm changing the recommendation to /var/empty for future releases. Thanks, Brent
