Wonky NTP startup and the incremental-configuration problem

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> >> ntpq can be used to tweak things, but it takes a password.
> >> I've never used it that way.
> > And if *you* haven't...I begin to wonder if 99% of the userbase even knows
> > this feature exists.
> 
> > I'm sorely tempted to just rip everything password-protected out of ntpq and
> > server side both, muttering "security" if we get any pushback.
> 
> There is a command line switch to write stuff out.  There is a script that 
> uses it to check the parser.  We could probably find some other way to do 
> that.

I just removed all the saveconfig stuff and its documentation.  There
was a surprising lot of it, all grotty and all looking quite
dispensible.  It's a good day when I can nuke that much complexity.

> > Hal: Do you think we'd get any pushback? 
> 
> Not from me, but there might be a few people out there who use it.

Noted.

> If the system crashes you don't get a chance to save state.

You're right. I was confusing two different cases.

> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > It seems to me that both burst and iburst are in serious need of being
> > better documented.  Would you do something about thst, please? 
> 
> The existing documentation is much better than I could write.  Have you 
> looked at it?
> 
> Start with docs/rate.txt and docs/poll.txt
> 
> You can learn a lot from the rate limiting stuff.  It's carefully tuned to 
> work with iburst and burst.

I will reread with that in mind.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>