[PATCH 0/2] ntpd: retry name-resolution until success

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 2:43 PM, Mark O'Donovan <shiftee at eircom.net> wrote:
> This is an attempt to fix bug 8131:
>   ntpd: should retry on name resolving error

Should it?
Why doesn't ping do this? telnet? netcat? No network utility does this.
Adding it to ntpd only would be inconsistent.

I can see why this request comes specifically for ntpd. It is often started
early at boot. Sometimes, network isn't up for some tens of seconds
after boot, so ntpd fails to resolve names.

There are other ways to fix this.
An utterly simplistic one would be to delay ntpd startup by, say, 20 seconds.
A slightly better one is to restart ntpd when it fails.

Will one of these solutions work? If not, why?

Please see this example:

https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/examples/var_service/ntpd/
https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/examples/var_service/ntpd/ntp.script