[geeks] Come here often?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:45:32 -0400
Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bill Bradford wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 03:09:28AM -0400, Jeff Cole wrote:
> >> All of our Suns (and Linux and AIX) at $work use ntpdate <timeserver>
> >> called via cron. That seems to work every time.
> > 
> > Why that instead of running ntpd?
> 
> Indeed.  As far as I can tell, ntpd would be superior in nearly every 
> regard.

When it actually bothers to work, yes.

The problem with ntpd is that it frequently fails with little explanation or
much if anything in the way of errors that you can figure out.

I've had a client->server setup work for a year, and then suddenly stop for
no reason.  It will be like that for awhile, and then just as suddenly start
working again.

Another big problem is running ntpdc on a client and finding impossible time
differences.  For example, the other day it showed my workstation was 22
seconds off from my time server, despite both being well within a second of
each other.

Frequently I'll find that ntpd is unable to connect to my time server, or my
time server's ntpd process will be unable to connect to its upstream server.

Yet, I can connect to any of those servers with ntpdate without issue.

Other times it will be the opposite: ntpdate cannot connect, ntpd can, and
then there are times when neither can connect, and I can't figure out why.

Most of the time I have pretty good luck with it, but ntp requires too much
babysitting, and I think it needs work, debugging, or maybe a rewrite.


-- 
shannon           | Consulting wouldn't be what it is today without Microsoft 
                  | Windows.
                  |        -- Chris Pinkham