Time skew

[Barry Byrne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of 
> scuba at centroin.com.br

> Hi All,
> 
>  	I'm facing some strange behavior with an skew in the 
> system clock.
>  	The hardware is a Dell PowerEdge 2950III, running two 
> instances of 
> FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE-p5 - amd64 over an ESXi hipervisor.
>  	To both were allocated 4 processors and 4 GB of RAM, 
> and dmesg for 
> both are identical.
>  	I'm using clockspeed to synchronize the clock, but just one of 
> them is delaying the clock a lot.
>  	The hardware clock is ok as far as the other virtual machine.
>  	Where should I start to investigate?

Marcelo,

I've not used the ESXi hypervisor, but do use ESX 3.5 with FreeBSD, and the
only way I've sucessfully kept FreeBSD servers in time, is to use either
ntpdate or ntpd. Lately, I've found ntpd to be a better solution. Vmware
have a KB article on the best way to configure ntpd on a virtual machine:

	
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=
kc&externalId=1339&sliceId=2&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=14730824&stateId=0
%200%204678302

For what it's worth this is the ntp.conf I use, which gives me no trouble:

tinker panic 0
restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict default kod nomodify notrap
server time.server.ip

Cheers,

Barry