ntpd on Red Hat

[mbrodeur at NextTime.com (Matthew J. Brodeur)]

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On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> The BLU server tends to drift. 
> I have ntpd running with a few time servers set up in ntp.conf. It appears 
> that ntpd is essentially a nop. It is running, but does not appear to 
> adjust the time based on the servers. I have the same servers set up for my 
> home system (SuSE running xntpd), which does appear to time synch 
> successfully. 

   Although it sounds like a network problem, I'd like to point out the 
'step-tickers' file.  If you create the file:
/etc/ntp/step-tickers
   The ntpd startup script will try use ntpdate to sync to the listed 
servers before actually starting ntpd.  The format of the file is just a 
hostname or address on each line, with #-style comments allowed.


> I tried running ntpdate on several servers listed in the public ntp web 
>
> I suppose that running ntpdate once daily would be more than sufficient.

   I'd recommend against using just ntpdate to set the clock.  For one, 
if ntpdate works, ntpd should work also, so you might as well use it.  The 
use of ntpdate seems to annoy certain people as well.  I don't remember 
the details, but it's generally regarded as a Bad Thing, and there has 
been talk of removing it from future releases.

   If it turns out that the ntp ports are blocked on that network you can 
still get decent accuracy by twiddling the kernel time settings with 
tickadj/adjtimex.  It's tedious, but I have personally managed to bring an 
Alpha from more than +30s/day to under a second a week after only a few 
days of adjustments.  


- -- 
     -Matt

Do not attribute to poor spelling that which is actually poor typing... 

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