Bug#947936: chrony: Does (still) not start properly on boot on buster

[Vincent Blut]

Hi Santiago,

On 2020-01-02T13:38+0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
>Package: chrony
>Version: 3.4-4
>Severity: important
>
>Dear maintainer:
>
>Apparently, installing chrony does not ensure at all that it will work.
>
>Google has moved from ntp in Debian 9 to chrony in Debian 10 for their
>default Debian GCE images, and I discovered this on a lot of GCE
>instances having a clock several minutes off.
>
>The problem I found is very similar to the one described here:
>
>https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=933370

Indeed, it sounds pretty similar.

>I believe the best summary of the problem was made by Michael Biebl
>here:
>
>https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/7104#issuecomment-471329392
>
>Quoting Michael:
>> As it stands, the current practice of having systemd-timesyncd.service
>> enabled by default (in Debian) and alternative implementations like
>> chrony or ntpd declare Conflicts=systemd-timesyncd.service in their
>> service file does not work reliably.
>
>
>AFAIK, this has been fixed on the systemd side in version 241-3 by
>dropping the "Conflicts" systemd had on chrony or ntpd.

Exact, the Debian systemd maintainers reintroduced the following drop-in 
file in version 241-3:

$ cat /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d/disable-with-time-daemon.conf
[Unit]
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/openntpd
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/chronyd
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/VBoxService

It prevents systemd-timesyncd from starting if one of the above
executables is present on the system.

>Unfortunately, AFAIK, conflicts are bi-directional, so apparently the
>problem will persist in buster as far as chrony still has conflicts
>in the systemd unit file.

What do you mean by “conflicts are bi-directional”?

Also, conflicting with systemd-timesyncd doesn’t seem to cause any issue 
on most systems (well, I hope ;-), so we should be cautious about 
incriminating “Conflicts= systemd-timesyncd.service” use as the root 
cause.

Would you please tell me how things go when removing 
“ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/chronyd” from the 
systemd-timesyncd service unit? Does that make chrony happy?

>Thanks.

Cheers,
Vincent
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