[nycbug-talk] dealing with drift

[Isaac Levy]

On Feb 28, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Isaac Levy wrote:
> Cool.  My question then changes to this:
... redundancy...

Doh, just as I hit send, Jim's message pretty much answered my question 
:)

On Feb 28, 2005, at 1:04 PM, Jim Brown wrote:

> I would add diversity here. Having only one time master is a SPoF.
> Diverse routing is helpful as well.

Configuring the master/slave relationships is the stuff I'm going to 
dig into here- gonna' rock the man pages for ntpd from here.

If there's a builtin way to setup a failover master/slave 
configuration, that's hot- but if not, I'd assume it can just be 
scripted in some simple/sane manner.  (thinking out loud, I'm imaging 
scripts to swap out config files and restart ntp based on responses 
etc...).

Further digging just showed me that a lib. written by a trusted source 
exists for my favorite language, Python:

http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxDateTime.html

>
> Just finished a similar exercise, though just for a collection
> (not a cluster) of machines.
>
> NTP on all BSDs but the OpenBSD box.  OpenNTP on that.
>
> I do miss the ntpdc utility on OpenBSD.  Unless I'm missing something,
> it's not easy to verify that you are, in fact, synched with another
> NTP master.
>
> Also- one other nit:   OpenNTP comes preconfigured to synch to
> a pool of servers from ntp.org.  Why, I don't know.  Simplicity
> maybe- but how am I supposed to verify *those* servers?

Hrm.  I love time problems- this question sounds like it leads to more 
of an ontological issue than a technical one :)

Rocket-
.ike