NTP broadcast client

Drew Tomlinson drew at mykitchentable.net
Sat Jul 12 16:05:53 PDT 2003


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Chen" <jonc at chen.org.nz>
To: "Kurt" <kurtbuff at spro.net>
Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2003 2:52 PM


> On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 02:22:39PM -0700, Kurt wrote:
> > Howdy all,
> >
> > I've got a Windows machine running Tardis ( nice piece of shareware)
on
> > my network, and it's broadcasting ntp updates on the subnet. I'm
trying
> > to get my freebsd machines to listen to those broadcasts to maintain
> > their own clocks, rather than querying the outside servers.
> >
> > I've got the following line in my rc.conf, which I read *somewhere*
> > after much googling that it would simply start the ntp daemon in
> > listening mode:
> >
> > ntpd_enable="YES"
> >
> > However, I see no ntp daemon, and am wondering just where I went
> > wrong....
>
> You're missing a /etc/ntp.conf. ntp.conf(5). This needs to contain the
> line:
>
>     broadcastclient

You also need to setup authentication (which I haven't been able to
figure out) or pass the -A switch to disable it.  Otherwise you will
wonder why your server won't respond to the broadcasts like I did for
several weeks.  :)  Here's the lines from my rc.conf:

# Start ntpd on boot
xntpd_enable="YES"               # Run ntpd Network Time Protocol (or
NO).

# Flags to ntpd (if enabled)
xntpd_flags="-A -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -l /var/log/ntpd.log"

It also appears from the man page that you could pass the "-b" switch to
enable broadcast client mode and then you wouldn't have to create
ntp.conf.  YMMV.

HTH,

Drew


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