NTPd not syncing time correctly - No errors either

[John Webster]

--On Thursday, May 31, 2007 19:02:47 -0400 Schiz0 <schiz0phrenic21 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> I'm running a dev server in VMWare (On a WindowsXP host) just to screw
> around with some things. Running FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. VMWare causes the clock
> in FreeBSD to be a inaccurate; it loses about 2 hours every 24 hours.
> 
> I read the handbook entry on the NTP daemon which automatically syncs the
> clock. Previously I was using cron to run ntpdate every 2 hours.
> 
> I set NTPd to update using NTP.org's pool servers. Yet it isn't syncing. I
> setup NTPd last night. I checked about 20 minutes ago and the time was off
> by 2 hours. I shutdown ntpd and ran ntpdate manually, and it updated just
> fine.
> 
> My logs have only this:
> /var/log/messages:May 30 23:04:19 Jupiter ntpd[489]: ntpd 4.2.0-a Mon May 28
> 23:49:40 EDT 2007 (1)
> /var/log/messages:May 30 23:04:19 Jupiter ntpd[489]: no IPv6 interfaces
> found
> /var/log/messages:May 31 16:41:50 Jupiter ntpd[489]: ntpd exiting on signal
> 15
> 
> The first two came up as soon as I started NTPd. The third one was when I
> stopped it. I rebuild world without IPv6 support. I tried adding the -4 flag
> to ntpd_flags in /etc/rc.conf as it says in the man page, but NTPd reports
> that -4 doesn't exist.
> 
> While NTPd is running, I ran "ntpq -np" to display the peers. It did output
> the four servers from pool.ntp.org, so it's connecting fine.
> 
> My /etc/rc.conf contains:
> ntpd_enable="YES"
> ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"
> ntpd_flags="-p /var/run/ntpd.pid -f /var/db/ntpd.drift -g"
> 
> Anyone know how I can fix this? Or should I just go back to running ntpdate
> with cron?
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<http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/KnownOsIssues>

"NTP was not designed to run inside of a virtual machine. It requires a high resolution system clock, with response times to clock interrupts that are serviced with a high level of accuracy. No known virtual machine is capable of meeting these
requirements.

Run NTP on the base OS of the machine, and then have your various guest OSes take advantage of the good clock that is created on the system. Even that may not be enough, as there may be additional tools or kernel options that you need to enable so that
virtual machine clients can adequately synchronize their virtual clocks to the physical system clock. "