[ntp:questions] NTP not syncing

antonio.marcheselli at gmail.com antonio.marcheselli at gmail.com
Sat Nov 2 21:43:43 UTC 2013


Ok, I will remove the 127.127.0.1, I just trusted someone else who said it was a good idea. Thanks.

>> I have the root privilege. I remounted the RO partition as RW, made my amendments and remounted as RO.
>

>Did you check that the file had actually been changed. The physical filesystem
>itself might be read only 

Yes, otherwise the ntp.conf wouldn't be like that. Trust me! :)

> This server does not have DNS capabilities and I cannot change it >unfortunately. I know that I should not use fixed addresses, but I cannot >change it.

>No idea what "This server does not have DNs capabilities" means. It does
>have access to the net. DNS is simply another network service. Like ntp. 

Then the DNS service is not running and I cannot start it. You'll have to trust me on that, my options are limited on this occasion.

> Ok, then I need to ask you what exactly "frequency error" means. I've been looking everywhere and still I fail to completely understand its meaning.

>The system advances the system clock by 1/100the of a second or 1/1000
>of a second every x ticks of the cpu clock where x is determined on
>bootup. ntpd determines if the rate of the ticks are done at 1/100 or a
>second per 1/100 of a second or at some different rate. If it is a
>different rate then that is a frequency error. Frequecy errors can arise
>because the crystal driving the system time heats up, or ages or
>whatever. 

When I said "Supermicro server board" I meant "a Server Graded motherboard manufactured by Supermicro". It's not a cheap motherboard, that's why I'm puzzled to hear that the crystal driving the system is not reliable. I've got this problem with umpteen servers based on Supermicro boards, looks strange to me that ntpd cannot work properly on these machines.

I'm also puzzled when you say that two weeks ago the server was running slower. It synced perfectly for 3 weeks, I don't know, I'm confused to be honest.

Could you tell me more on adjtimex?

> How can I verify if the stepping has been disabled or not?
> ntp.drift at the moment is -500.000

>Which is way out of spec and cannot be corrected by ntpd. 

And this is caused by a bad system clock? Is there a chance that there is some other process running in background which is tweaking the clock which I'm not aware of? 

Thank you all for your help.
Antonio



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