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There's a lot to admire in OpenBSD but sometimes the peripheral tools they deliver don't work well. The example I know best is OpenNTPD (last link in your comme

There's a lot to admire in OpenBSD but sometimes the peripheral tools they deliver don't work well. The example I know best is OpenNTPD (last link in your comment). It has a bunch of problems, including relatively poor clock discipline compared to other NTP implementations. And it doesn't even try to handle leap seconds. That causes problems on the machine itself which may or may not matter to you, but it's catastrophic if that OpenNTPD serves time to other servers. Unfortunately there's a bunch of OpenNTPD servers in the NTP Pool actively providing bad time. Some details from the 2016 leap second: https://community.ntppool.org/t/leap-second-2017-status/59/10 https://community.ntppool.org/t/leap-second-2017-status/59/1... Again I mostly admire OpenBSD. But OpenNTPD is not the best example of their work.

moviuro 8y ago
This is seriously bad, but I do get why they thought OpenNTPd was necessary (bad/perfectible code in the other implementations). Maybe I'll check that at home (where I replaced FreeBSD's ntpd with OpenNTPd).
- NelsonMinar 8y ago
  Yeah the stock old ntpd had a lot of unused code and various security problems over the years. It makes sense OpenBSD would replace it. Just a shame they didn't do it completely. I think that describes a lot of OpenBSD tools; you're trading off some functionality for very good security. There are better NTP implementations now. Chrony is great, it's the default in Ubuntu now. NTPsec is coming along although I haven't tried to use it myself. Also good ol' ntpd is greatly improved. https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ https://www.ntpsec.org/ https://www.ntpsec.org/
eikenberry 8y ago
Have you had a chance to look at systemd-timesyncd? I'm curious how it stacks up as a NTP client. Was thinking about switching my systems to it (from chrony) as I don't need the NTP server functionality.

moviuro 8y ago

This is seriously bad, but I do get why they thought OpenNTPd was necessary (bad/perfectible code in the other implementations). Maybe I'll check that at home (where I replaced FreeBSD's ntpd with OpenNTPd).

NelsonMinar 8y ago
Yeah the stock old ntpd had a lot of unused code and various security problems over the years. It makes sense OpenBSD would replace it. Just a shame they didn't do it completely. I think that describes a lot of OpenBSD tools; you're trading off some functionality for very good security. There are better NTP implementations now. Chrony is great, it's the default in Ubuntu now. NTPsec is coming along although I haven't tried to use it myself. Also good ol' ntpd is greatly improved. https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ https://www.ntpsec.org/ https://www.ntpsec.org/

eikenberry 8y ago

Have you had a chance to look at systemd-timesyncd? I'm curious how it stacks up as a NTP client. Was thinking about switching my systems to it (from chrony) as I don't need the NTP server functionality.