OpenNTPD inclusion on Fedora Core

Tyler Larson fedora-devel at tlarson.com
Mon Mar 21 21:01:35 UTC 2005


Paul A. Houle wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 15:20:35 +0200 (EET), Pekka Savola 
> <pekkas at netcore.fi>  wrote:
>     Well,  I've always been a little worried about NTP.  The US military 
> runs  well-publicized and well-used NTP servers,  and they wouldn't be 
> doing  what we pay them to do if they weren't ready to slip somebody a 
> bad packet  when duty calls.
> 

The US military isn't the only group that runs NTP servers. They keep time 
because they *have* to. GPS (among other things) depends on it. We simply ask 
them what time it is because they happen to know. Conspiracy theories aside, 
NTP is robust enough to react sanely when "slipped" a "bad packet"--not to 
mention the dubious tactical usefulness of telling the general public the 
wrong time.

NTP does time synchronization. It isn't designed to keep the clocks accurate, 
it's designed to keep them synchronized. "Accurate" really is defined by the 
user as far as time sync is concerned. You set up a master time server, and it 
is definitive of accurate for your domain--everyone else syncs off of it.

If your organization REALLY needs to know what the correct time is, and REALLY 
can't depend on any external entity (like the evil US empire), then your 
organization REALLY needs to run its own atomic clock. NTP will allow it. NTP 
isn't the problem.




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