[ntp:questions] Where is the log file?

David J Taylor david-taylor at blueyonder.neither-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk
Wed Jun 18 08:01:09 UTC 2008


Maarten Wiltink wrote:
> "David J Taylor"
> <david-taylor at blueyonder.neither-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk> wrote in
> message news:iU16k.11391$E41.7688 at text.news.virginmedia.com...
>> Alan wrote:
>
>>>  The Windows Event log shows an error, "Unable to initialize .rnd
>>> file":
> [...]
>> I'm not sure about this, but I think the SSL package used in NTP
>> tries to write a random number file to the root directory of the
>> hard disk, and most likely Windows Vista in not allowing access. ...
>
> I think that's exactly it. The location defaults to c:\ on Windows,
> which is a staggeringly bad default in my opinion, but at least it is
> configurable through an environment variable. On this machine, I have
> this:
>
> randfile=%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\.rnd
>
> which makes it use the same filename but in the Windows equivalent of
> Unix's /etc directory, mostly because ntp.conf lives there, too.
>
> A temp directory might be a better place and note that they might have
> deduced that from an environment variable as well. Something under an
> equivalent of the /var directory might be better still but I'm not
> sure what that would be. All Users/Application Data perhaps?
>
> Groetjes,
> Maarten Wiltink

Maarten, if I ever knew that, I had long since forgotten it!  I've just 
added a system environment variable:

RANDFILE=C:\Tools\NTP\etc\.rnd

and restarted NTP.  It has created the .rnd file where it was supposed to. 
Now to see if it makes any difference to the timekeeping....

  http://www.satsignal.eu/mrtg/gemini_ntp.html

It would be good to see something included with NTP (or their build of 
SSL) to conform to the OS conventions you mention.

Thanks,
David 





More information about the questions mailing list