[geeks] Come here often?

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:28:54 -0500
> Phil Brutsche <phil at tux.obix.com> wrote:
> 
>> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>> 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.
>> The OpenBSD folks have that last bit covered (OpenNTPd)
>>
>> Dunno if it works any better.
> 
> I wonder if the problem is some internal heuristic that determines if a
> server is trustable, and it occasionally messes up, even in the most
> base "use this server" configuration.
> 
> It appears that with even the most simple configuration, ntpd still runs some
> kind of tests to see if a server is worthy and disobeys your configuration.
> 
> Usually it is temporary, but the problem with that is if your clock drifts
> too far during the "bad time", when ntpd starts working again, it will be
> too far off to change.
> 
> I guess that's really the real problem: intermittent issues with your "time
> network" cause the drift to pass limits of correction, making the problem
> appear worse than it really is.

There's always the option of having a script run from cron which checks 
whether ntpd has gotten out of sync, and if it has, runs ntpdate, and 
then restarts ntpd.  I do this on a bunch of AIX boxes at work.

Peace...  Sridhar