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Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:42:02 -0700
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@onstor.com>
To: Paul Negus <paul.negus@onstor.com>, Abdallah Harb
 <abdallah.harb@onstor.com>
Cc: Brian Stark <brian.stark@onstor.com>, Larry Scheer
 <larry.scheer@onstor.com>, Vikas Saini <vikas.saini@onstor.com>, Jonathan
 Goldick <jonathan.goldick@onstor.com>
Subject: all we need is time
Message-ID: <20080730174202.540a4d45@ripper.onstor.net>
Organization: Onstor
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I'm proposing the addition of an Ops/AT/something (forgive my
ignorance) procedure for all filers before they are shipped: their
clocks be synchronized to an NTP server.  If they are configured to the
same ntp server and then rebooted, they should have the same time as
that ntp server.  This would help us greatly with problems in the field
where nodes in a cluster have the clock set at installation time because
it isn't close, and the result is that every node in the cluster has,
sometimes slightly, sometimes largely, different times.  This is
causing us significant headaches.

Having the time synch'd on each system before it's sent out would give
us a great jump on these types of problems: all the user would have to
do is set the timezone and all nodes in the cluster would have times
that are very close, which will be fine until their ntp config is
working.  Which for some customers who are NTP challenged, can be
days/weeks.

Thanks,

a
