[ntp:questions] NTPd instability and openntpd

Mij mij at bitchx.it
Fri Sep 14 23:00:30 UTC 2007


I submitted to pool.ntp.org with a stratum 2 NTPd server. The useful
system scoring however shows me significant discontinuity in the
service:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/81.208.58.150

The host is a dual processor FreeBSD host with low load, today
counting 107 days of uptime. The connectivity is a 11Mbps fiber optic,
that proven pretty reliable in the last five years.
So I did not believe those stats first and put a polling script on
another server 150 km away from this one. Unfortunately or not, it
confirmed the downtimes.

So NTPd seems the only point of guilt. I re-compiled with debugging
enabled to trace the problem. I could be unable to read its debugging
dumps, but its L1 and L2 debug levels proven useless to me. For
example, none did show client request coming in, nor served nor
rejected. L1 is quite a lot verbose and L2 is extremely verbose, so
further levels would be simply unreadable to me.

NTPd is not under explicit ulimit. Confs are nearly freebsd's defaults
(5 servers are used and some statistics are enabled).

In favour of sparing some time I tried possible alternatives. I see
OpenNTPd favourably, as openbsd's software typically works simply and
well. But I see some (old, not up to date) criticism on its precision
and stuffing an imprecise server into the pool would be quite
unethical.

So a twofold request:
1) any suggestion for a better mean to trace down the instability
problem of NTPd ?
2) any comment on the current quality of openntpd, notably if it is
suitable to be run in pool.ntp.org

thanks




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