FreeBSD 7.9-stable: weird messages in /var/log/messages?

[Michael Proto]

Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:52:23 +0100
> Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
>> It is reporting large variations in the rate of your time clock (see 
>> kern_tc.c).
> 
> Aha, I see. Thanks for explaining that.
> 
>> Also, you appear to be emailing from the distant future.  Please
>> reply with stock tips :)
> 
> distant future, even? :-)
> The two things share a common symptom; the nic on that particular
> machine is a ral(4) one, and I am having connectivity problems
> (connections from other machines to this particular machine drops).
> That's why I booted the machine with verbose messages, and got those
> messages in the first place.
> It looks like network connectivity going away without the network
> interface going down / up has confused ntpd, I had to restart it just
> now.

I've noticed this with ntpd myself in various scenarios, mainly when
using MPD (via a ng_pppoe tunnel) and the tunnel drops-out from
underneath ntpd. Normally when this happens I see two instances of ntpd
running instead of one, and it doesn't respond to a normal kill signal.
I've written the following quick-hack script to restart it (running
every 5 minutes from cron):

#!/bin/sh -e

for conf in /etc/defaults/rc.conf /etc/rc.conf /etc/rc.conf.local; do
  [ -f "$conf" ] && . "$conf"
done

if [ $ntpd_enable = "YES" ]; then
  PROGNUM=`ps xww | grep "$ntpd_program .* $ntpd_flags" | grep -v grep |
wc -l`
  if [ "$PROGNUM" -gt 1 ]; then
    /etc/rc.d/ntpd stop
    sleep 10; killall -9 ntpd
    /etc/rc.d/ntpd start
  fi
fi



-Proto