Re: NTP

From: John Smith (nospam_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 09/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 01:43:39 -0700

Friedrich Remmert wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I reconfigured the firewall. Now I get the following outputs. What I can
> see is a local address (80.130...). Thanks to gracious firewall.
>
> Now I suppose: the ntp-system is listening to replies to this local
> ip-number. But when the next time-sync is started, the system gets a new
> number. Can this be the solution/problem?
>

Hmm... well, the 'local' column refers to the local interface address.
But you may have a point there - what sort of network access does the
affected machine have? Is it a dedicate network LAN (static or via DHCP)
or a dialup account? (if the local address keeps changing while the
machine is up, then ntp won't be able to sync correctly). On the other
hand, the machine gets a new address each time it is rebooted (and never
in between) then that should be OK.

> Thanks!
> fr.
>
> ntpdc> peers
> remote local st poll reach delay offset disp
> =======================================================================
> =ntp1.ptb.de 80.130.176.118 16 1024 0 0.00000 0.000000 0.00000
> =ntp2.ptb.de 80.130.176.118 16 1024 0 0.00000 0.000000 0.00000
>

There is one other good info - the '=' prefix to the ntp1.ptb.de servers
means that they are being polled in client mode. Though the 'reach'
column is still zero and st 16 (unsynchronized).

> ntpdc> pstats ntp1.ptb.de
> remote host: ntp1.ptb.de
> local interface: 80.130.176.118
> time last received: 90610s
> time until next send: 11s
> reachability change: 90096s
> packets sent: 148
> packets received: 1 <<<<<<<<< ????????????

Ok this is pretty suspicious - packets received should be
much more than 1.

> bad authentication: 0
> bogus origin: 0
> duplicate: 0
> bad dispersion: 0
> bad reference time: 0
> candidate order: 0
>
> From /var/log/ntp:
>
> 19 Sep 03:52:35 ntpd[27543]: offset 0.000000 sec freq 0.000 ppm error
> 0.000008 poll 4
> 19 Sep 04:52:34 ntpd[27543]: offset 0.000000 sec freq 0.000 ppm error
> 0.000008 poll 4
> and so on ...
>
> What I found is
>

Look for 'synchornization lost' messages in /var/log/ntp.

Also, was ntp configured by hand (/etc/ntp.conf) or via the YaST
NTP module? (Please post here).

John