[patch] Out of the box NTP support (on FreeBSD)

[Roderick van Domburg]

Kenneth Porter wrote:
> There would also need to be some way for them to get notified when a value was
> updated (and presumably when the interface first comes up). There's also a
> chicken-and-egg issue at boot time, when the service may not be up when the
> notification is sent. This is where the service should supply a script to
> process the notification.

There is no point for network daemons to start before dhclient. This is 
reflected in all sound rc.d implementations.

That being said, there doesn't really seem to be a chicken-and-egg 
issue. At boot time (i.e. initial dhclient startup) the service 
configurations could simply be written out, to be read by their 
respective network once they start.

> For instance, a script for ntp would update its config file, then issue
> "service ntp condrestart". (How would the options be made available to the
> script?)

I think it would be best if network daemons would simply implement a 
decent SIGHUP handler to reread their configuration files. That seems to 
be the cleanest and most transparant route to go.

The options could be supplies to the script the same way they are 
supplied to dhclient-script currently.

> So we need two directories, one for options to request and one for callback
> scripts. Or the callback script could be invoked with a parameter to make it
> echo the list of needed options to stdout, and another to process the received
> options, similar to the way initscripts have standard parameters
> start/top/restart.

Agreed. So basically the callback scripts should support a start and a 
restart. Upon start, the configuration file is written out. On restart, 
the configuration file is rewritten and a SIGHUP is sent (or whatever 
other logic the network daemon wishes to implement). I propose to rename 
these two parameters two to `configure' and `reconfigure'.

Regards,

Roderick