[Freeipa-devel] NTP in FreeIPA

[David Kupka]

Hello everyone!

Is it worth to keep configuring NTP in FreeIPA?

In usual environment there're no special requirements for time 
synchronization and the distribution default (be it ntpd, chrony or 
anything else) will just work. Any tampering with the configuration 
can't make it any better.

In environment with special requirements (network disconnected from 
public internet, nodes disconnected from topology for longer time, ...) 
time synchronization must be taken care of accordingly by system 
administrator and FreeIPA simply can't help here.

Also there are problems and weird behavior with the current FreeIPA 
installers:

* ipa-client-install replaces all servers in /etc/ntp.conf with the ones 
specified by user or resolved from DNS. If none were provided nor 
resolved the FreeIPA server specified/resolved during installation it 
used. This leads in just single server in the configuration and no time 
synchronization when this server is down/decommissioned.

* ipa-client-install replaces the NTP configuration. If there was any 
parts previously edited by system administrator it's lost.

* ipa-server-install adds {0-4}.$PLATFORM.pool.ntp.org to /etc/ntp.conf. 
What's the point in doing that? These servers're already in the 
configuration file installed with ntp package.

I have NTP-related WIP patches that solve some of the issues but in 
general I would prefer to remove the whole thing together with 
documenting "Please make sure that time on all FreeIPA servers and 
clients is synchronized. On most distributions this was already done 
during system installation."

Can we mark NTP options deprecated in 4.5 and remove them and stop 
touching any time syncing service in 4.6?

-- 
David Kupka