I'd love to see a, possibly low priority, debconf question asking me for the
IP address or DNS name of my local timeserver, to minimize the amount of
manual editing /etc/* requires. I suppose a yes/no question for whether the
server works in "offline" mode or not will then also be required.

Hugo van der Merwe

Starting in 1.20-5 Chrony will use pool.ntp.org by default.  This should
work for just about everyone.  I'd rather stay away from Debconf.

tags 211353 wontfix
thanks

Hello,

Marking as wontfix as I’m definitely not sure implementing the
debconf mechanism
for such thing is the right approach.

Thanks,
Vincent

Hi. At a recent debian-cloud sprint, we made the choice to switch from
ntpd to chrony for our cloud images. As some of the cloud providers
offer their own local NTP services, we'd like the ability to specify
an entry for such a source in the default images for a given service. As
such, I'd like to ask on behalf of the cloud team that you reconsider
providing a debconf option to select a time source. I'm happy to send
patches if that'll help.

My suggestion would be to maintain the current pool.ntp.org entry as the
default, and offer a debconf option to override this value at debconf's
low priority so it won't bother most people installing the package.

See, for example, the following docs about the AWS NTP service,
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/introducing-the-amazon-time-sync-service/
and
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/set-time.html#configure-amazon-time-service

Thanks
noah

Hi Noah,

Great!

Seems fair.

Well if that’s something the cloud team wants to further improve their
integration work, I’d be happy to accept such a patch. However I think
using debconf in this case is quite fragile. Configuring the preferred
time source depending on the cloud provider we are running on should
ideally be done at runtime.

I’m not sure that overriding the default pool of NTP servers we are
using is the right approach, we should instead add the time source
provided by the user to the configuration file and append the “prefer”
option to it, so that if any issue should arise with that manually
filled time source, that would leave the user with a sane fallback.

Cheers,
Vincent