[OE-core] [PATCH] systemd-conf: add timesyncd.conf

[Phil Blundell]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 11:02:15PM +0300, Cengiz Can wrote:
> 1) Does Google allow their time servers to be directly used?

I believe so.  I couldn't immediately find anything on their website that
said differently.

> 2) Can we apply for a vendor name like "oe" so at least they can
> throttle/rate limit their inbound traffic?

I guess the OpenEmbedded corporate entity could apply for one.  I don't
actually know what the current organisation is; the website just says
"OpenEmbedded is a Texas-registered company. More details to follow."

Mostly though I think this is a distro configuration issue and ought to
be addressed there.

> Because at current state, timesyncd is unreliable and doesn't have sane
> defaults enabled. pool.ntp.org is a community effort but has thousands of
> servers that are available for service. Not just 4 Google controlled
> servers.

I'm fairly sure that time.google.com has more than four servers (they are
load-balanced behind a single public IP, just like the Google nameserver
8.8.4.4 is not a single machine either).  It's not completely obvious to 
me that pool.ntp.org is generally more available.

The Google servers also do leap smearing which might or might not be a 
good thing depending on your point of view.  I'm not sure whether the
pool.ntp.org ones do the same thing or not.

p.