[ntp:questions] Re: What does 73.78.73.84 refer to?

Tim tim at mail.localhost.invalid
Tue Nov 8 23:42:45 UTC 2005


Tim:

>>> I see "73.78.73.84" as the refid for the local clock on one of my
>>> machines (running Fedora Core 4 Linux, if that helps), and I can't
>>> figure out where it gets that from, nor what it means.

(apparently ntp-4.2.0.a.20040617-8, if anyone wants to know)


Heiko Gerstung:
 
>> 73 is the ASCII code for "I", 78 is "N", another 73 "I" and finally 84
>> stands for "T"... therefore 73.78.73.84 is "INIT"... there was a bug in
>> certain versions of NTP where the refid of the LOCALCLK driver was not
>> set correctly. If you really care about that, you can fudge the refid to
>> something else.
>> [...]
>> IIRC it was only a display problem and had no other drawbacks..

Okay, I know I don't need to worry about it.  Thanks.

Martin Burnicki:

> .. beside the fact that ntpq may try to do DNS reverse lookups on that
> number, which will not give any useful result, but introduce delays until
> the DNS query times out:

Okay.  If I want a timely response, I'll do "ntpq -pn" instead of "ntpq
-p".  Hopefully it's just a display issue while running that command,
rather than an issue that's going to occur while NTP is doing its main
business (keeping time).

Just seems odd that it does it under certain circumstances (as per my
original posting), not always.

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