ntpd on FreeBSD

[Lowell Gilbert]

Freminlins <freminlins at gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> After a power outaga (Level 3 at Goswell Road, London), all our FreeBSD
> machines came up OK.
>
> Nearly all of them had a problem though with ntpd. I'm guessing that most of
> these machines booted before the the ntp servers came up. What happens is
> that the machine runs two copies of ntpd:
>
> root       337  0.0  0.3  2964  1772  ??  Ss   Sun04PM
> 0:24.75/usr/sbin/ntpd -c /etc/ntp.conf -p /var/run/ntpd.pid
> root       427  0.0  0.3  2964  1788  ??  S    Sun04PM
> 0:00.76/usr/sbin/ntpd -c /etc/ntp.conf -p /var/run/ntpd.pid
>
> ... and they never sync. The only way to fix this is to kill both ntpds,
> then restart ntpd.
>
> Is there a tidy way round this? It's not much fun logging into 40+ machines
> and killing a restarting a key process. I have no idea why two ntpds are
> running in the first place. The machines that are correct have an identical
> config.

For what it's worth, I spent a while looking at it, and I can't see
anything that would cause this.  Ending up with *no* ntpd running, I
can imaging from various failures, but not two.  I suspect I would
need another clue to look in the right place.