On Jul 18, 2019, at 9:27 AM, Luigi Rosa <lists@luigirosa.com> wrote:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL] Daniel Migault wrote on 18/07/2019 15:07:
>> Wouldn't it be nice to have an infrastructure similar to what the NTP >> pool provides for time synchronization?
My two cents of an admin of hosts (mainly Windows) that travel back and forth thru the seven seas (namely Cruise ships).
Short version: TZ sync is a pain in the arse.
Long version. You cannot use UTC for all the hosts because, for instance, some of them show information to the guests or are used to manage crew shifts (always expressed in ship time).
On some ships the so called "master clock" has two NTP servers: one "classic" UTC and the other with ship time.
We cannot use ship time NTP server because NTP clients (correctly) assume that NTP is about UTC, while the local time is just a "logical view" of NTP. If we sync Windows hosts with ship time the result is a mess (somebody said "Kerberos"?).
That seems like the hard way to solve the issue. It seems far more natural just to run NTP the way it was designed, and on any host where you want to show local time, just set its TZ to the value you want and change it when you sail into another timezone. paul