[ntp:questions] NTP client configuration

David Woolley david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid
Thu Sep 27 17:57:51 UTC 2012


David Taylor wrote:

> 
> I haven't used "broadcast" or "auth", so I don't know if that affects 
> things.  My understanding of NTP was that unless you configure it 
> otherwise, an offset exceeding 128 milliseconds would force NTP to step 
> the PC's clock rather than changing the rate, so I am surprised you are 
> seeing 500 ms offsets.

ntpd will wait a considerable amount of time before accepting that the 
time it has really is broken.  That I think is the issue here.  There is 
a tinker option which will reduce that.  However the fundamental problem 
is that NTP is intended to be used with time sources that behave like 
UTC, with the only perturbations being those due to variations in 
network delays, etc.  The OP is asking the system to work with a 
fundamentally broken time source.  To get anything like that to work, he 
is going to have to tune things a very long way from their best practice 
settings, and accept that the ability to do so is not part of the core 
requirements for ntpd.

The best solution is to fix the time source, but I suspect there is some 
reason why that is not an option.



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