[ntp:questions] Leap second bug?

Spoon root at localhost.invalid
Wed Jan 2 17:05:08 UTC 2008


Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> Spoon wrote:
> 
>> ntpd kicked my clock forward one second on January 1 at 00:19:38 UTC.
>> 
>> (My ntp.conf lists 12 servers. Delays range from 28 to 48 ms.)
> 
> Unless you have a custom version of ntpd,

I didn't modify the source in any way.

> I believe that ten servers is the absolute maximum!
> I believe that ntpd will ignore the extras.

The documentation for ntpq does state:
( http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/ntpq.html )

.  excess

     The peer is discarded as not among the first ten peers sorted by 
synchronization distance and so is probably a poor candidate for further 
consideration.

But I've tested a configuration with 225 servers, and none were 
considered excess. (While 16 were considered candidate.)

for TALLY in '*' '+' '-' '#' '.' ' ' 'x' ; do
   N=$(grep -c "^\\$TALLY" DUMP)
   echo "$TALLY : $N"
done

* : 1
+ : 16
- : 33
# : 114
. : 0
   : 57
x : 4

> Four, Five, and Seven are the magic numbers to protect against the 
> failure of one, two, and three servers.  Note that "failure" can mean 
> either a server failing to respond to queries or a server with a 
> blatantly incorrect time.  I have not tested this but I believe that 
> ntpd will always select both the server with the "one true time" and an 
> "advisory committee" of three servers if there are sufficient servers 
> available to do so.
> 
> I'd suggest trimming  your server list to the five or seven servers 
> closest to you in net space; e.g. the ones with the lowest value of delay.

I had never considered I could set up /too many/ servers. I had always 
thought ntpd would just pick the N best.

> FWIW it's rare to be able to FIND ten servers that are close to you!
> Ten GOOD servers ranks close to miraculous.  Again, FWIW, even most of 
> the "bad" servers know what time it is but the network between you and 
> the server has enough jitter to mangle the time.

I can "see" 40 servers for which the delay is less than 60 ms.
The jitter is less than 2 for most (90%) of them.
(I suppose there are other metrics to consider before calling
a server good or bad?)

Regards.




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