[axxs-sysadmin] wrong time on axxs.org - ntpdate?

[boud]

hi all,

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Dave Fregon wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 17:34 +1100, aketus wrote:
>> A good idea, and one I tried to bring to attention in October of last year...

Catch-22: until we get the date/time fixed up, we won't remember on time
that we've got to fix it. :P

>> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/axxs-sysadmin/2006-October/1017-15.html
>>
>> Better late than never :/
>
> urk :P
>
>> At least with the sites i've managed, it hasn't been possible to
>> compensate for the time difference, since it hasn't been exactly 2
>> hours difference, but always out by about a quarter of an hour on top
>> of that. (i.e GMT+10 hours on AptGetAnarchy currently reads at 16:32
>> instead of 15:16)
>
> Well I'm all for it straight away, the indymedia's are the primary
> concern I reckon.

In terms of minimising upsets to running services, i guess the question 
is what services (if any) depend seriously on elapsed time.

* timeouts - E.g. you log in at 10:25, you have a 10 minute
timeout and then suddenly the system resets to 08:00. Since you have until
10:35 before you timeout, in reality you get about 2.5 hours instead of
10 minutes.   i guess it could be a problem for admins who log in at
internet cafes.

* sequence of newswire articles - for cms'es (or cms templates) that
order by published time (or last modified time) rather than article id
number, people publishing for a couple of hours after the change will
see their articles posted as the not-quite-the-most recent article.

* specifically imc poland and torun - poland is just a static mirror,
so it shouldn't be affected; torun has only just started, and no urgent
events coming up in the next few days AFAIK.

My suggestion is choose a time when most oceania indymedians are fast
asleep in bed (or doing something more fun than publishing articles ;).


i suggest a cron job (once a day):

#!/bin/sh
NTPOPTIONS="-u"
NTPSERVERS="pool.ntp.org"
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -b -s $NTPOPTIONS $NTPSERVERS
exit 0


This works fine on debian-sarge.

cheers
boud