[ntp:questions] Time offset / Jitter under FreeBSD

Vince jhary at unsane.co.uk
Sun Dec 2 19:18:43 UTC 2007


Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> Bob wrote:
>> I've been experimenting with running a timeserver under FreeBSD. Basically, 
>> I'm trying to build a dedicated box as a time server. I am currently running 
>> the Meinberg port under windows, and that seems stable.
>>
>> I installed FreeBSD on a drive, and booted my windows machine from it. The 
>> FreeBSD port of ntpd shows a offsets in the 20-60 ms range. Issues with 
>> jitter, also. Remember, the same machine running windows is generally sub 
>> millisecond - http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/74.181.17.243/log offset.
>>
>> So.... I tried two different other computers after this. One was a Abit AMD 
>> something or other. The other is a VIA Mini-ITX. Similar results.
>>
>> In both the windows and FreeBSD cases, I verified the offset under FreeBSD, 
>> and the lack of offset under windows on the same machine was real by listing 
>> the IP of the machine with a list of other time servers including the 
>> NTS-100 on the ntp client on my laptop. The computer looked good under 
>> windows, and was way off from the rest of the pack when it was running 
>> FreeBSD.
>>
>> Is there some issue with, or some trick that needs to be played with the 
>> ntpd distributed with FreeBSD 6.2? I did another install of FreeBSD, and the 
>> results were the same. ntp.conf simply contains four servers - the same as I 
>> normally use. One of them is a local NTS-100. 
>>

To OP: I would suggest updating to the latest version from ports. The 
version with the base system is 4.2.0 while ports/net/ntp is ntp-4.2.2p4 
(you could possibly even try ports/net/ntp-devel which is ntp-4.2.5p75) 
Theres a ports freeze at the moment I believe but I'll try and poke the 
maintainer to update the non devel port unless there a reason not to. 
Not certain this will help but more recent version cant hurt.

>>
> 
> Have you tried building and installing the Reference Implementation of 
> ntpd?  Source is available at ntp.org.
> 
> There is something out in BSD Land called "Open NTP" or something very 
> similar.  When I last heard of it, the authors hadn't yet managed to 
> "get it right"!
> 
Thats an option in freebsd but the base distribution uses the isc hosted 
  reference implementation.

Vince

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