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

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.isc.org
Thu Nov 10 03:28:30 UTC 2005


Martin Burnicki wrote:
> Heiko Gerstung wrote:
> 
> 
>>Tim wrote:
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>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. 
> 

The refid should NOT be fudgeable, it's meant for loop prevention.

> [...]
> 
>>IIRC it was only a display problem and had no other 
>>drawbacks..
> 
> 
> .. 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:
> # host 73.78.73.84
> Host 84.73.78.73.in-addr.arpa not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
> 

It shouldn't, it's the refid and not an IPv4 address.

Danny
> Martin




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