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

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Tue Nov 8 21:16:16 UTC 2005


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. 
[...]
> 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)

Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Meinberg Funkuhren
Bad Pyrmont
Germany




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