If you have a mercurial/git installation even in a small group, I am sure you'll prefer accurate timestamps in your commit history. And the list goes on...
I believe an RTC is perfectly capable of that.
Some distros like Ubuntu seem to assume (or did) that no one would ever want to switch ntp off. I wonder if any ubuntu server users have had any issues there recently. I guess they wouldn't have known until it was too late though?
That is a reasonable assumption (windows vista/7 makes it too, btw). The only downside may be CPU wakeups caused by ntp, but that's the chrony story.
On systems where lots is enabled by default it is perhaps a reasonable assumption to run ntp by default, if it truly wakes the cpu then I'd say that default is wrong too. It is not reasonable to force users to chmod 000 ntp because init configuration is being ignored which was the case for atleast one Ubuntu release. Windows 7 does the same as XP, enabled by default but can be switched off in atleast three places. Time config, Windows Time service and Group policy. -- ________________________________________________________ Why not do something good every day and install BOINC. ________________________________________________________