troglobit / sntpd Goto Github PK

When booting a Linux system with the kernel command line option:
ipv6.disable=1 the IPV6 kernel module will be loaded but administratively disabled.
If I try to use ntpclient 2017.246 on such a system to set the time and exit:
ntpclient -dstvn pool.ntp.org
I get
ERROR - Failed creating UDP socket() to SNTP server: Address family not supported by protocol
Booting without this option eliminates the issue.

In rate.awk FNR is used to read only one record. o1 and o2 has same argument $5.For same record argument will be the same .slop is using calculation o1 subtracting from o2 .It will be always zero.

I'm using ntpclient to monitor the clock offset of a bunch of machines.

With the original ntpclient version, I could easily get this information (root or not):

root$ ntpclient -c1 -h pool.ntp.org
43441 60350.979    1963.0      5.9     890.3  21179.2     11344

In troglobit's fork, '-h' was changed to mean 'help' and the output goes to stderr (why?) so I have to adjust a few flags and redirect the output to stdout. It broke out of the box compatibility with the old version, but so far I can still live with that (as non root):

nobody$ ntpclient -c1 pool.ntp.org 2>&1
43441 58627.120    2270.0      8.3      27.8  63232.4     66222

Now the problem arises when I want to do the same thing as root. First, I need to disable daemon mode, which is enabled by default for root 😞. However, this still does not work! When running as root, the output is disabled and I need to enable debug mode to see anything (which also adds other unwanted messages):

root$ ntpclient -c1 -n -d pool.ntp.org 2>&1
packet of length 48 received
43441 59793.248    2063.0     34.0    5109.1  42770.4     -4915

To make it worse, the only way I could find this was by looking at the code:

https://github.com/troglobit/ntpclient/blob/435e52063a863e1b1ef0463f78cb1b156cd1bd00/src/ntpclient.c#L477-L483

That being said, I have two suggestions to solve this:

• add a usermode flag, so useful output can be seen without enabling debug mode, or
• turn the output on when verbose mode is enabled (instead of debug). This is probably better, since providing a probe count already disables live mode and enables verbose mode:
  https://github.com/troglobit/ntpclient/blob/435e52063a863e1b1ef0463f78cb1b156cd1bd00/src/ntpclient.c#L989-L993

TL;DR: this fork adds a daemon mode to ntpclient, but almost breaks its original purpose. It would be good to not assume behaviour based on the EUID or to at least introduce a 'usermode' flag.

I don't mind preparing a pull request after getting some feedback on this.