Ubuntu Server seeded package review

Tobin Davis gruemaster at gmail.com
Mon Dec 9 04:42:27 UTC 2013


On Fri, 2013-12-06 at 11:43 -0800, Seth Arnold wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 05:15:41PM -0600, C de-Avillez wrote:
> > Although I am probably hammering a rather cold iron, I still fail to
> > understand why ntp is not installed by default. I would expect precise
> > timekeeping to be something important on a server (instead of allowing
> > the time to drift slowly).
> 
> I would like to hear from An Expert if ntpd, ntpdate, ptpd, etc., are
> reasonable things to install in virtual machine guest environments.
> 
> My personal suspicion is that when a virtual machine host runs ntpd,
> guests should not run ntpd, since two daemons attempting to skew the
> clock sounds like a recipe for highly chaotic behavior. ntpdate would
> be alright since it does not attempt to manage clock skew. ptpd no idea.
> 
> When the virtual machine host does not run ntpd, I suspect ntpd, ntpdate,
> ptpd, are all fine things to run in the guests.
> 
> I'd love to know for certain what the best practices are. It might
> influence the default package installs.
> 
> Thanks

My personal experience with a VM server running 12.04 and multiple VMs
with various Linux and Windows distros is that while the server is
running ntpd, the guests don't appear to get updated correctly from the
host.  Some of the systems that I have taken the time to point ntpd to
an internal server (we're behind a corporate firewall) are ok, the
others tend to get skewed after a bit.  No idea why.

-- 
-- 

Tobin Davis 

Yes, we will be going to OSI, Mars, and Pluto, but not necessarily in
that order.
		-- George Michaelson




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