[Xymon] Patch: ntpdate option -p deprecated

[J.C. Cleaver]

On Mon, February 12, 2024 14:05, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2024 at 00:07, Brian Scott <bscott at bunyatech.com.au> wrote:
>
>>
>> i think using a discouraged wrapper like this makes no sense.
>>
>> However, we still need some way to deal with the cases where the default
>> is still the old ntp.
>>
>> > The attached rewritten patch implements this.
>>
>
>
>> Would you mind if I tried to generalise your patch to automatically
>> detect which version to use and pick the correct options accordingly? A
>> quick look at the code suggests changes to configure.server, a new
>> script under build/ to detect which type of ntp is installed, and
>> possibly changes to the various build/Makefile.* to set a per-OS
>> default. Also I notice that the defaults when nothing is set in
>> xymonserver.cfg are established in lib/environ.c but they would be quite
>> messy to tinker with.
>>
>
> I don't think this should be done at compile/build time. The build server
> might not use the same NTP package, or even the same version of distro, or
> the same distro, or even the same OS.
>
> The xymonserver.cfg config file has NTPDATE and NTPDATEOPTS values that
> can
> be modified by the sysadmin, to use ntpdig, chronyd, or whatever is
> installed onto the Xymon server at the time. If ntpdate is deprecated,
> perhaps these variables should now be adjusted to reflect a more commonly
> installed NTP client.

It probably warrants a re-think of how we're doing ntp checks overall, but
I agree that for the moment this probably should be handled at the
distribution packaging level via environment variables.

>
> I'm not sure if the Xymon server does anything with the results of the
> ntpdate query. If it does, then we need to be mindful that the parser
> might
> not recognise the format of ntpdig output. In which case, a wrapper might
> actually be the best solution. Perhaps the Xymon source should provide a
> few different wrapper scripts called ntpdate-chrony, ntpdate-ntpsec, etc,
> and the sysadmin can simply adjust NTPDATE to use the appropriate wrapper
> script.

IIRC chrony *should* work correct, but I don't know that ntpdig has been
tested here.

The general process has been hacking the cl to present the same data so
the xymond_client parser doesn't have to care, but with all the changes
with ntp client-side over the years this might be one to clean up for
sure. Especially with it already being special-cased.

-jc