[ntp:questions] Local clock question with dialup connection

David Woolley david at djwhome.demon.co.uk
Sun Apr 15 16:58:10 UTC 2007


In article <200704151700.57526.cave.dnb at tiscali.fr>,
cave.dnb at tiscali.fr (Nigel Henry) wrote:

> ntpd is still running, but has timed out on trying to contact the Internet 
> timeservers.  If I stop, then restart ntpd, the timeservers are contacted ok, 

I'm not sure what you mean by timed out.  If a server becomes unreachable,
it will continue to be polled and will start to be used again when it 
becomes reachable again.  The two machines may drift apart in the time, but
they will also drift from UTC, so there is a risk of a time step whatever you
do.

Adding a local clock (remembering to make the stratum as high as possible)
to the upstream one of the pair will keep the two in step with each other, but
may slow down the re-acquisition of the true time.  For some people, that is
the best approach.

However, if you are on a dynamic IP address, the servers will never be 
re-acquired, and you will have to unconfigure them and reconfigure them,
or re-start the daemon, to get their addresses resolved again, regardless
of whether you have the local clock configued.




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