ntpd just sits there and does nothing

[Kevin Oberman]

> Hi,
> 
> [LoN]Kamikaze wrote:
> > Doug Hardie wrote:
> >   
> >> On Jul 19, 2007, at 10:08, [LoN]Kamikaze wrote:
> >>
> >>     
> >>> As the subject says, on my 6-stable systems ntpd just sits there and does
> >>> nothing. The logs only mention when the daemon gets started or shut
> >>> down. It
> >>> complains when servers are not reachable, but does nothing when they
> >>> are available.
> >>>
> >>> The drift file always contains 0.00.
> >>>
> >>> ntpdate and openntpd both successfully manage to set the time, so I
> >>> suppose
> >>> it's a problem with ntpd.
> >>>       
> >> Are you on a static IP address?  If not, ntpd obtains its IP address
> >> when it starts up and uses it forever.  If your IP address changes then
> >> it will not be able to communicate with the upstream ntp servers.  It
> >> has to be restarted everytime your IP address changes.
> >>     
> >
> > I have a static address. The trouble is it seems to operate fine, only it
> > forgets to change the time when it differs from the time servers too much.
> > Sometimes my clock goes wrong more than 1 second within a day.
> >   
> ntpd will not change time if the difference is too big - I think it 
> should be less then 1000s.
> ntpdate will :)

ntpdate is deprecated and is not recommended these days. The proper answer is 
to start ntpd with the -g option and to add the 'iburst' option to one or more 
of the servers in /etc/ntp.conf. The 'iburst' will speed up th initial sync to 
close to that of ntpdate, but have much greater accuracy.

You can get the '-g' by adding 'ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"' to rc.conf.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751


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