[ntp:hackers] Does ntpd need to whine more ?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Mon Oct 3 05:29:50 UTC 2005


In message <200510022332.27677.Mark.Martinec at ijs.si>, Mark Martinec writes:
>=46rom Poul-Henning Kamp :
>> I examined the client population of my public NTP server today and one
>> of the things I noticed is that people don't seem to notice when their
>> time sync stops working and falls back to localclock or bogusly
>> configured refclocks:
>>...
>> 80.163.104.246     123 no   4 3 11  7 -17 -861.909907751 [LOCALCLOCK#0]
>> 84.252.140.74      123 no   4 3 11 10 -17 -656.351917002 [LOCALCLOCK#0]
>> 195.137.236.98     123 no   4 3 11 10 -16 -552.525271231 [LOCALCLOCK#0]
>
>I believe there are two main culprits which make people put the LOCAL clock
>driver in their ntpd configuration:

It's not LOCALCLOCK I'm after, it's the fact that ntpd doesn't tell
the user that it has lost external sync.

I'm also wondering the wisdom of not slamming the poll rate back
to 64 seconds when the shift register runs empty.  With a poll
rate that has grown to 1024 it takes an hours after connectivity
is back before it even pays attention to the timestamps and
several hours before it is back in tolerance.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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