[ntp:questions] ntpd questions - FreeBSD 5.5

David Shoulders dhs at bendcable.com
Thu Jul 9 03:57:09 UTC 2009


I have a little file server running in my basement, and since it's the 
only machine running all the time, I set it up to run ntpd and provide 
clock settings to my other machines.

The machine is running FreeBSD 5.5.  I installed it some years ago, and 
have had no reason to upgrade it.

Initially, I ran ntpd for a day or two to establish a drift value, then 
killed it and set up a crontab entry to run "ntpd -q" every 6 hours.  
This worked perfectly for 2 or 3 years.  Corrections were always small 
numbers of msec.

Then, a few days ago, a disk failed.  I replaced the disk and restored, 
and everything was fine -- except that I had lost the drift file.  So, I 
started ntpd, let it run overnight, and looked at the drift file.  It 
had an obviously bogus number.  The clock corrections were very large 
and not getting smaller.  So I put a reasonable number in ntp.drift 
(based on my vague memory of the old good value -- about 100), restarted 
ntpd and let it run a few hours.  It seemed to be converging, so I 
stopped it and reinstated the crontab/ntpd -q routine -- this time every 
3 hours.

12 out of 19 corrections were around 20-30 msec, but the others were 
off-the-wall -- hundreds of msec.  So I did some arithmetic (on the 
reasonable corrections only) and adjusted the drift value.  Since then, 
most of the corrections have been less than 10 msec, but I'm still 
getting some crazy ones -- like 1.7 seconds!

The wild corrections are all in the same direction (-), so I don't think 
the time derived from the servers is wrong.  It seems as if the clock in 
the PC must be taking off on wild excursions occasionally.  Is this 
possible?  How could replacing a disk have brought this on?  What am I 
missing?

Thanks in advance.

- David





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