chrony.conf ubuntu crash

[MrOffline77]

The timesync role places the chrony.conf into /etc for each OS. Ubuntu (DEBIAN) expects the config in the /etc/chrony/ directory. Should be handled inside /tasks/main.yml as os specific variable.

- name: Generate chrony.conf file
  template:
    src: chrony.conf.j2
    dest: /etc/chrony.conf
    backup: true
    mode: 0644
  notify: restart {{ 'chronyd' if timesync_mode == 1 else 'timemaster' }}
  when:
    - timesync_mode != 2
    - timesync_ntp_provider == 'chrony'
    - "'chrony' in ansible_facts.packages"

[richm]

The directory should be set in a file in vars/ - we have a Debian file - https://github.com/linux-system-roles/timesync/blob/master/vars/Debian.yml - is it different than Ubuntu?

[MrOffline77]

Ubuntu expects the chrony.conf as describe above in a different directory. The Path is hardcoded in the main.yml see template copy process I quoted above. Would be great if we could introduce an option to change the target path for the template within the debian vars file as you mentioned.

[richm]

Rather than add a "one-off" setting specifically for Ubuntu to tasks/main.yml, I would like to refactor the code to handle this case better:

• refactor tasks/set_vars.yml to use this method https://github.com/redhat-cop/automation-good-practices/tree/main/roles#platform-specific-variables instead of the "first found" method
• this will allow use to consolidate all of the various vars/Platform_Ver.yml into vars/Platform.yml
• add a new var timesync_chrony_config_path - in vars/RedHat.yml this will be /etc/chrony.conf - vars/Debian.yml will use /etc/chrony/chrony.conf (I believe os_family Debian includes Ubuntu - if not, then add a vars/Ubuntu.yml)
• use timesync_chrony_config_path for https://github.com/redhat-cop/automation-good-practices/tree/main/roles#platform-specific-variables

We can then use this same approach for /etc/ntp.conf, /etc/ptp4l.conf, /etc/sysconfig/phc2sys, /etc/sysconfig/network, and any other platform differences.

One problem is that even though the code "supports" Debian, Ubuntu, etc., we have no CI testing on anything except RedHat os_family platforms, so we would have no way of knowing if the refactoring introduced any regressions.

[Thulium-Drake]

I have made a PR addressing the location #187 as the role didn't crash on Debian, but the configuration wasn't effectuated after running the role 😅

That should fix this issue as well, as Ubuntu should match with os_family.