[ntp:questions] Re: ntp client over satellite and no CMOS battery

Brian T. Brunner brian.t.brunner at gai-tronics.com
Thu Oct 6 15:20:40 UTC 2005


I'll assert the manual pages and the HTML pages don't give enough information about ntpstat to have figured this out by 'sudo RTFM'.

Man page entries for ntpstat (found by Yahoo) give Profoundly Useless information.
        ntpstat returns 0 if clock is synchronized. 
        ntpstat returns 1 if clock is not synchronized. 
        ntpstat returns 2 if clock state is indeterminate, for example if ntpd is not contractible. 
        => this trinary status is not equal to "SEEKING_n"

man ntpstat on my RH7.3 system returns that there is no man for ntpstat.
ntpstat returns 'command not found'.
locate ntpstat returns nothing.
Note: I am running ntpd as a service so I must have installed something! ntpstat didn't come with it.

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/index.html has nothing for ntpstat that I could find

http://www.ntp.org/htdig/search.html returns no hits for ntpstat.

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html  has nothing like "System Level Commands Explained" and nothing for ntpstat itself.

http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Support/WebSearch given a topic name of ntpstat returns nothing, topic text of ntpstat returns two hits neither of which is a man page.

I'd suggest it's time you guys stopped being the best kept secret around.

I wish I could grep through /proc/sys/ntp and find the configured servers and their current states.  
This probably wouldn't help the Solaris/Windows folks much...

This message sent to you with the Amish Virus, it works on mutual trust: please delete some files yourself.

Brian Brunner
brian.t.brunner at gai-tronics.com
(610)796-5838

>>> tim at mail.localhost.invalid 10/06/05 08:17AM >>>
On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 18:34:08 +0000, Brian T. Brunner sent:

> missing from the ntpd design(?): some system-readable TimeIsGood flag set
> by ntpd for applications to use where they must have trustable time. alt:
> TimeStateIs flag with values of LOST (no net, no idea what time it is),
> SEEKING (found a source, getting time), and SYNC (time is good) alt:
> SEEKING_n for n ranging 1 to the "minimum acceptable set size" for your
> site; SYNC means the highest minimum has been met.  This allows different
> applications to decide when is the time sufficiently good for that
> application.

Are you saying that the stratum information can't provide you with
adequate information about how much faith to put in your time, or that the
output from ntpstat (three different example results below) isn't machine
parseable in some useful way?

synchronised to local net at stratum 8
   time correct to within 12 ms
   polling server every 64 s

unsynchronised
  time server re-starting
   polling server every 64 s

synchronised to NTP server (83.137.103.134) at stratum 3
   time correct to within 264 ms
   polling server every 64 s

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