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Date:      Sun, 22 Aug 1999 21:29:22 +1000
From:      Greg Black <gjb-freebsd@gba.oz.au>
To:        Jon Hamilton <hamilton@pobox.com>
Cc:        Will Andrews <andrews@TECHNOLOGIST.COM>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Securelevel 3 ant setting time 
Message-ID:  <19990822112923.6666.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>
In-Reply-To: <19990821031948.09B2B1D@woodstock.monkey.net>  of Fri, 20 Aug 1999 22:19:48 EST
References:  <19990821031948.09B2B1D@woodstock.monkey.net> 

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Jon Hamilton writes:

> } Just as a bit of extra information, xntpd is useless for small
> } networks that don't have constant connectivity to time servers.
> 
> Absolutely untrue.  There's value in keeping a group of machines
> synchronized to _each other_, regardless of whether they're also 
> synchronized to the correct time.

It may well be useful to *some* people to maintain a bunch of
machines with the wrong time, but it's utterly useless to me
and, I'm certain, to lots of other people.

> It is true that _for some purposes_
> xntpd isn't all that useful in an intermittently-connected scenario,

And one of those purposes would be keeping the clocks on the
machines close to the correct time, something that should be
(and is) easy to do with the appropriate tools.

> but that doesn't render it completely devoid of any value.  

I could say that the QIC-150 tape drive in my gateway machine is
useful because it fills in the gaping hole that would otherwise
disfigure the front of the machine's case, but the fact that it
doesn't perform what I consider to be its primary function (that
of writing data onto tapes) makes it useless in my terms.  The
same goes for xntpd in the scenario that I mentioned.

-- 
Greg Black -- <gjb@acm.org>



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