gnome-panel NTP time sync allows me to enter random URLs without complaining

[Martin Olsson]

1. right click the time/date in gnome
2. select "Adjust time/date"
3. click the "unlock" and enter admin password so you can change time
4. select "keep synchronized with internet servers"
5. (now install NTP support if you didn't already have it, maybe reboot is necessary I don't remember)
6. click the "select servers" button
7. click "add" and enter "www.cnn.com"

Actual:
It doesn't complain at all. User thinks his time is now being synchronized with the specified server.

Expected:
It should print an error because www.cnn.com is not a valid NTP server.

---

I actually had a lot of problems with this because I didn't enter www.cnn.com but I entered ntp.somehost.com (which some other webpage told me was valid) and since GNOME didn't complain I thought everything was working just fine. Later I discovered that the time was different on machines which synced to the same NTP server and it turned out that this NTP server was offline.

[Martin Olsson (mnemo)]

I took the time to report this upstream as well. This seems like a good bug for someone who wants to make their first contribution to GNOME or Ubuntu.

[Nicolas Quenouille (nicoz)]

I can reproduce it so I mark it as confirmed. You already reported this bug to the developers of the software, and now you can track it and make comments directely here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543819
Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Jon Packard (jonpackard)]

I can confirm this on Ubuntu Hardy. I got the exact same results as mnemo.

gnome-panel:
  Installed: 1:2.22.2-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 1:2.22.2-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 1:2.22.2-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:2.22.1.2-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

gnome-panel has no ntp option, what is described there is the gnome-system-tools time-admin interface

[Martin Olsson (mnemo)]

It seems that in jaunty the time-admin util isn't invoked when you right-click the time/date and select "adjust". Thus, NTP functionality seems to have been dropped (at least as far as "main stream" users are concerned, that don't mess with "ntp" package etc).