ntpd just sits there and does nothing

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 12:18:59PM -0700, Chuck Swiger wrote:
>  No machine should ever poll faster than once a minute (aka "minpoll 8") to 
>  someone else's timeserver without prior agreement.  For an example of a 
>  reasonable client config, MacOS X uses a minpoll of 12 and a maxpoll of 17.

And an addendum to this:

Our servers use "maxpoll 9" for a very specific reason: it appears to
work around an issue where on FreeBSD ntpd continually flips between
PLL and FLL mode.  The default for maxpoll is 10 (1024 seconds).

Taken from our ntp.conf is this comment:

# maxpoll 9 is used to work around PLL/FLL flipping, which
# happens at exactly 1024 seconds (the default maxpoll value).
# Another FreeBSD member recommended using 9 instead.
# http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2006-December/031512.html

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |