Andrew Ayer

Accurate time is essential on a server, and running ntpd is the best way to ensure it. Unfortunately, ntpd, especially on Debian, can be finicky and in the past I've had trouble with clock drift and ntpd failing to start on boot. Here are my best practices to avoid the problems.

On Debian, make sure lockfile-progs is installed

On Debian (and likely Ubuntu too), there's a nasty race condition on boot between ntpdate and ntpd. When the network comes up, ifupdown runs ntpdate to synchronize the clock. But at about the same time, ntpd starts. If ntpdate is still running when ntpd starts, ntpd can't bind to the local NTP port and terminates. Sometimes ntpd starts on boot and sometimes it doesn't!

The Debian scripts avoid this using locks, but only if the lockfile-progs package is installed. This is a Recommends: for ntpdate, but if you don't install Recommends: by default, you may miss this.

If you use DHCP, don't request ntp-servers

If your system gets its IP address from DHCP using dhclient, then by default dhclient will update your ntpd configuration with NTP server information it receives from the DHCP server. It is extremely frustrating to configure reliable upstream NTP servers only to have them replaced with unreliable servers (such as those that advertise phony leap seconds, as has happened to me multiple times). And the last thing you want is your configuration management system fighting with dhclient over what NTP servers to use.

To prevent this, edit /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and remove ntp-servers from the request line.

Don't use the undisciplined local clock (i.e. server 127.127.1.0)

Make sure these lines aren't in your ntp.conf:

server 127.127.1.0 fudge 127.127.1.0 stratum 10

These lines enable the Undisciplined Local Clock, and cause ntpd to start using your local clock as a time source if the real NTP servers aren't reachable. This can be useful if you want to keep a group of servers on a local network in sync even if your Internet connection goes down, but in general you don't need or want this. I've seen strange situations where the local clock becomes preferred over the real NTP servers, resulting in clock drift that goes uncorrected. Best to disable the local clock by removing all references to 127.127.1.0.

The implementation of std::basic_istream::ignore() in GCC's C++ standard library suffers from a serious flaw. After ignoring the n characters as requested, it checks to see if end-of-file has been reached. If it has, then the stream's eofbit is set. The problem is that to check for end-of-file, ignore() has to essentially peek ahead in the stream one character beyond what you've ignored. That means that if you ask to ignore all the characters currently available in the stream buffer, ignore() causes an underflow of the buffer. If it's a file stream, the buffer can be refilled by reading from the filesystem in a finite amount of time, so this is merely inefficient. But if it's a socket, this underflow can be fatal: your program may block forever waiting for bytes that never come. This is horribly unintuitive and is inconsistent with the behavior of std::basic_istream::read(), which does not check for end-of-file after reading the requested number of characters.

The origin of this problem is that the C++ standard is perhaps not as clear as it should be regarding ignore(). From section 27.7.2.3:

basic_istream<charT,traits>& ignore(streamsize n = 1, int_type delim = traits::eof());

Effects: Behaves as an unformatted input function (as described in 27.7.2.3, paragraph 1). After constructing a sentry object, extracts characters and discards them. Characters are extracted until any of the following occurs:

• if n != numeric_limits<streamsize>::max() (18.3.2), n characters are extracted
• end-of-file occurs on the input sequence (in which case the function calls setstate(eofbit), which may throw ios_base::failure (27.5.5.4));
• traits::eq_int_type(traits::to_int_type(c), delim) for the next available input character c (in which case c is extracted).

Note that the Standard does not specify the order in which the checks should be performed, suggesting that a conformant implementation may check for end-of-file before checking if n characters have been extracted, as GCC does. You may think that the order is implicit in the ordering of the bullet points, but if it were, then why would the Standard explicitly state the order in the case of getline()? From section 27.7.2.3:

basic_istream<charT,traits>& getline(char_type* s, streamsize n, char_type delim);

Effects: Behaves as an unformatted input function (as described in 27.7.2.3, paragraph 1). After constructing a sentry object, extracts characters and stores them into successive locations of an array whose first element is designated by s. Characters are extracted and stored until one of the following occurs:

1. end-of-file occurs on the input sequence (in which case the function calls setstate(eofbit));
2. traits::eq(c, delim) for the next available input character c (in which case the input character is extracted but not stored);
3. n is less than one or n - 1 characters are stored (in which case the function calls setstate(failbit)).

These conditions are tested in the order shown.

At least this is one GCC developer's justification for GCC's behavior. However, I have a different take: I believe that the only way to satisfy the Standard's requirements for ignore() is to perform the checks in the order presented. The Standard says that "characters are extracted until any of the following occurs." That means that when n characters have been extracted, ignore() needs to terminate, since this condition is among "any of the following." But, if ignore() first checks for end-of-file and blocks forever, then it doesn't terminate. This constrains the order in which a conformant implementation can check the conditions, and is perhaps why the Standard does not need to specify an explicit order here, but does for getline() where it really does want the end-of-file check to occur first.

I have left a comment on the GCC bug stating my interpretation. One problem with fixing this bug is that it will break code that has come to depend on eofbit being set if you ignore all the data remaining on a stream, though I'm frankly skeptical that much code would make that assumption. Also, both LLVM's libcxx and Microsoft Visual Studio (version 2005, at least) implement ignore() according to my interpretation of the Standard.

In the meantime, be very, very careful with your use of ignore(). Only use it on file streams or when you know you'll be ignoring fewer characters than are available to be read. And don't rely on eofbit being set one way or the other.

If you need a more reliable version of ignore(), I've written a non-member function implementation which takes a std::basic_istream as its first argument. It is very nearly a drop-in replacement for the member function (it even properly throws exceptions depending on the stream's exceptions mask), except that it returns the number of bytes ignored (not a reference to the stream) in lieu of making the number of bytes available by a call to gcount(). (It's not possible for a non-member function to set the value returned by gcount().)

Update: as of 2022, I no longer use or recommend name.com. My preferred registrars are, in order, Amazon Route 53, Gandi, and Google Domains.

Namecheap has brilliant marketing. The day that GoDaddy announced their support of SOPA, Namecheap pounced on the opportunity. They penned a passionate blog post and declared December 29, 2011 "Move Your Domain Day," complete with a patriotic theme, a coupon code "SOPAsucks," and donations to the EFF. Move Your Domain Day was such a success that it has its own Wikipedia article. Namecheap led the charge against GoDaddy, and I think it's safe to assume that most people who transferred from GoDaddy because of SOPA transferred to Namecheap. Now they seem to be the preferred registrar of the Hacker News/Reddit crowd.

Now consider Name.com. They too opposed SOPA and encouraged transfers using a "nodaddy" coupon code. But they didn't exert nearly as much effort as Namecheap and as a consequence probably lost out on a lot of potential transfers.

But Name.com has a bigger problem. They get raked over the coals on Hacker News because their free DNS hosting service adds a wildcard record that points their users' otherwise non-existent subdomains to their own ad-laden landing page. I think that's bad and they shouldn't do it. But at the same time, people should understand the distinction between domain registration and DNS hosting.

I'm very happy with Name.com as a domain registrar. It is the best I've used (among Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Directnic, Gandi, and 1&1) and the first that I haven't had any significant complaints about. I haven't used Namecheap. Namecheap looks like a good registrar too, but Name.com appears at least as good, if not better. Their UI is friendly and uncluttered. Their about page makes them seem just as non-evil as Namecheap. Name.com has long supported both IPv6 glue records and DNSSEC (Namecheap recently added IPv6 glue but still has no DNSSEC support). Name.com has two-factor authentication, which is pretty important for such a critical service.

When you buy a domain from Name.com, you're paying for the registration. You don't have to use their DNS service, especially when there are so many good options for DNS hosting: Amazon's Route 53 is very inexpensive, Cloudflare offers DNS as part of their free plan, Hurricane Electric has a free DNS service, Linode has free DNS for their customers, there are paid providers like ZoneEdit, SlickDNS, etc. Or you can host your own DNS.

As a general rule, registrars make crummy DNS providers. Usually the interface is clunky and they don't support all the record types. Only a few months after registering my first domain with Network Solutions, their entire DNS service suffered an hours-long outage during which my domain was unresolvable. Ever since, I've hosted my own DNS without a problem (recently I added Linode as my slave).

I don't have a dog in this race, but I think it would be a shame for someone to exclude a good registrar like Name.com from consideration just because they're a bad DNS provider. It would also be a shame for someone to use any registrar's crummy DNS service when there are so many better options out there.