Subject: [bug#45794] [PATCH 0/1] services: openntpd: Remove support for deprecated "-s" option.

From: Simon South <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:02:34 -0500

This patch removes support for OpenNTPD's deprecated "-s" command-line option
and the corresponding "allow-large-adjustment?" field from Guix's
openntpd-configuration record type.

Previously this option allowed OpenNTPD to make a single, arbitrarily large
adjustment to the clock at startup. In the current release this option has
been disabled[0] in favour of the use of authenticated constraints, and
configuring a service with "(allow-large-adjustment? #t)" now causes this
message to appear in /var/log/ntpd:

    -s option no longer works and will be removed soon.
    Please reconfigure to use constraints or trusted servers.

For systems like the ROCK64 that lack a battery-backed clock, generally the
solution is to replace the "allow-large-adjustment?" option with a setting
like

    (constraint-from '("www.gnu.org"))

which will give OpenNTPD an independent estimate of the current time and allow
it to evaluate the trustworthiness of the configured NTP servers.

[0] https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.sbin/ntpd/ntpd.c?rev=1.127&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

--
Simon South
[email-masked]

Simon South (1):
  services: openntpd: Remove support for deprecated "-s" option.

 doc/guix.texi               |  6 +-----
 gnu/services/networking.scm | 12 +++---------
 tests/networking.scm        |  3 +--
 3 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)

-- 
2.29.2