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

[Martin Kosek]

On 11/15/2012 03:22 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
> 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.

I considered that option too, but it simply just did not seem very "polite" to
silently stop and disable chrony with some custom user time&date
synchronization configuration that user may rely on.

Telling user what's the problem and providing him with options what to do
seemed more user friendly to me...

> 
> 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.
> 

The force flag to not configure time sync tool is already there as --no-ntp. I
already discussed this with Rob before, I was advised to rather stick with the
ntpd only for the time being. Adding Rob to CC to comment on this one.

Martin