3 ms·

Nothing special - just a homelab. It's not so much the precision that matters at home as for planning when the home becomes an island, in 'orphan mode' as chron

Nothing special - just a homelab. It's not so much the precision that matters at home as for planning when the home becomes an island, in 'orphan mode' as chrony calls it [1], without a time reference at all. Time really is a 'sovereign function' per Telstra's report [2], especially if you have internal HTTPS, etc. Last summer an 8+ hour mains power outage drained my home CWWK OPNsense router's UPS then internal battery (it must have been losing voltage). When mains power came up the router was unable to connect to the ISP because the internal time was completely wrong and I had to manually set it via console. However, the internal batteries and clocks on other home network infrastructure (HP NAS and Lenovo Tiny) were fine. The chrony.conf orphan mode: server 192.168.1.1 server 192.168.1.2 local stratum X orphan (higher X determines who is master in orphan mode, usually minimum 10) Annoyingly, the OPNsense chronyd plug-in does not (yet) implement the "local orphan" mode [3], so I have not yet confirmed that it does accept the non-reference master orphan time to bootstrap itself... should test before the summer storms start again. 1. <https://chrony-project.org/doc/latest/chrony.conf.html https://chrony-project.org/doc/latest/chrony.conf.html> 2. <https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/what-we-ve-learned-from-the-external-investigation-of-our-july-o https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/what-we-ve-learned-from-...> 3. <https://github.com/opnsense/plugins/issues/5115 https://github.com/opnsense/plugins/issues/5115>

anitil 22d ago
Ah I see in my head I expect blackouts to be a few minutes, so I hadn't thought what would happen after several hours. When I was in the embedded world I used to explain that https implies a whole lot of infrastructure that isn't obvious at first for this reason (and also that cert rotation implies the ability to update the firmware or some filesystem which isn't always the case).

anitil 22d ago

Ah I see in my head I expect blackouts to be a few minutes, so I hadn't thought what would happen after several hours. When I was in the embedded world I used to explain that https implies a whole lot of infrastructure that isn't obvious at first for this reason (and also that cert rotation implies the ability to update the firmware or some filesystem which isn't always the case).