I would prefer switching to chrony, primarily because it is indeed better with intermittent connections. NTS would be nice, too, but of little practical value at the moment.

But I don't see it all that important or urgent, ntpd works well enough for almost all, so I would not prioritize it very high.

Tapani Tarvainen

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 11:56:21AM +0100, Peter Müller (peter.mueller@ipfire.org) wrote:

Hello development folks,

since Gerd has worked on chrony, which is believed to be more robust in case of unstable internet connections (which possibly affects some IPFire users) than ntpd is, I eventually thought whether or not replacing ntpd with chrony was worth the effort.

Another motivation would be chrony's support for NTS, however, there is no thing like a distributed NTS pool as of today. Cloudflare and Netnod are providing public NTS servers, and probably some others do so as well, but I really would like to have a decentralised pool before switching to NTS.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks, and best regards, Peter Müller

Hello,

I would like to give my 2 cents on this:

I have compiled chrony for IPFire 3 many years ago until I wanted to use it in a semi-production setup and realised that there were features missing that I needed. Mainly that it was only a client and could not serve time to the network back then.

I believe that these things have now been resolved and that chrony would be a better choice now since it has a much more modern code base.

Dropping chrony for ntp should be a low-hanging fruit since we do not use any special features and the NTP confirmation file is very short. That behaviour and feature set should be possible to recreate very easily.

My bigger concern is adding additional functionality like NTS. We would have to add more UI for that, which might be a lot of work. Maybe someone will volunteer for that?

Big plus point is the self-made configure script. Can’t wait to run into all those problems.

On 31 Dec 2020, at 10:56, Peter Müller peter.mueller@ipfire.org wrote:

Hello development folks,

since Gerd has worked on chrony, which is believed to be more robust in case of unstable internet connections (which possibly affects some IPFire users) than ntpd is, I eventually thought whether or not replacing ntpd with chrony was worth the effort.

Another motivation would be chrony's support for NTS, however, there is no thing like a distributed NTS pool as of today. Cloudflare and Netnod are providing public NTS servers, and probably some others do so as well, but I really would like to have a decentralised pool before switching to NTS.

I believe we can switch to chrony without supporting NTS from the first moment.

Any thoughts on this?

Gerd & Peter, are you going to take this on as your project?

Thanks, and best regards, Peter Müller

-Michael