Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003 23:49:50 +0200 From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> To: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Add timecounter option to rc.conf Message-ID: <xzpllyns3cx.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> In-Reply-To: <30340.1049663478@critter.freebsd.dk> ("Poul-Henning Kamp"'s message of "Sun, 06 Apr 2003 23:11:18 %2B0200") References: <30340.1049663478@critter.freebsd.dk>
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"Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> writes: > I on the other hand think that by now /etc/rc.conf has so many knobs > and handles that it is practically impossible to figure out how to > do anything without resorting to "less /etc/rc.*" to figure it out :-( 'man rc.conf' should hopefully be reasonably up to date, and /etc/defaults/rc.conf briefly documents most of the knobs. The main problem is that there are knobs which aren't listed in either of these and which I suspect even most committers never knew existed, because our rc.d scripts were imported wholesale from NetBSD with some but IMHO not enough adaptation. Differences between NetBSD and FreeBSD should have been viewed as an opportunity to improve both, but instead the scripts were "dumbed down" to provide very little beyond what already existed in FreeBSD. > > (another such example is ntp.conf - the needs of most ntpd users can > > be met with an ntp.conf generated automatically from information which > > is already present in rc.conf) > The new NTP4 automatic configuration stuff is promising in this respect, > with a little luck people will need to configure nothing at all. That would be nice, but we can still do far better than the status quo for the current version. We actually have some of the required knobs (inherited from NetBSD along with the rest of rcNG) but they are not documented and still fall a little short of what I would like to see. I would like to have a single ntp_servers variable listing NTP servers in the host's vicinity; if set, that list would be appended to the ntpdate command line, and used to autogenerate ntp.conf. Of course, if it were empty (the default), any preexisting ntp.conf would be left intact. I also think ntpdate_enable and ntpd_enable should default to YES if ntp_servers is non-empty, but that might be slightly more controversial. Currently, ntpdate gets its server list from the ntpdate_hosts variable, or from ntp.conf if ntpdate_hosts is empty. None of this is documented, because it came from NetBSD with rcNG. Previously, we had to list servers in ntpdate_flags; I bet a lot of people still do, unaware that the servers listed in ntp.conf will be appended to this list. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org
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