Revision as of 19:25, 8 July 2013

Removed deprecated calls of using ntpdate in favor of ntpd

Summary

ntpdate is slowly being depricated. STIG enhancements for RHEL 6 penalize systems that make use of ntpdate.

Owner

Name: Michael Harris
Email: MikeDawg@gmail.com
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 19
Last updated: 2013-7-8
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

ntpdate is slowly being depricated in favor of ntpd. DoD STIGs now penalize for the use of ntpdate on Red Hat Enterprise systems. I would like to "modernize" the ntpdate utility to do two things.

First, I would like to get rid of the dependency of ntpdate, in favor of ntpd.

Second, I would like to add a set time for ntpd to check for time updates (as configured by the user in /etc/sysconfig/ntpdate).

Benefit to Fedora

First and foremost, it is backing away from a dependency that is set to deprecate at some point in the future. ntpd now handles many/most of the tasks that ntpdate was once used for. I'm also adding the feature of either random time checks based on a user interval, or just checks at an interval.

Scope

Proposal owners:

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

No changes will be needed for the system to function as-is. In order to incorporate a (random or not) check of time will require modification of the /etc/sysconfig/ntpdate configuration file.

How To Test

Will need to verify that ntpd correctly launches, and is able to set the time/date. Will also need to verify the random/interval check is running. This can be easily done by parsing the info out the log files.

User Experience

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Dependencies

Will have the continued dependency on ntpd.

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), Yes/No

Documentation