[ntp:questions] What exactly does prefer do?

Lee Sailer lee.sailer at direcway.com
Thu Apr 6 12:53:22 UTC 2006


I have occasionally had a GPS NTS server goes slowly insane.  That is,
it starts to differ from the others (we have 6 world wide) by 1, 2,
then 3 second, and eventually hundreds of seconds.

What bothers me about "prefer" is that if the preferred one goes
insane, how long will clients that prefer it follow it?  How does
"prefer" actually effect the choice and weighting function.

Could people with actual internals/algorithm knowledge respond?  Also,
if it matters, this is NTP 3.5f (HP-UX 11.11).




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