Couple of weeks ago I asked for some ideas to combat a bunch of Calix customers not getting DHCP leases. It is related to NTP. Some of the E7 shelves had goofy dates like 2036 or 1996. We took them off of NTP and manually coded the time. That calmed things down.
We also set the lease limit so each ONT can have two leases. Theoretically this could double the number of IPs we hope this is short lived. Otherwise if you have CPE on the ONT ethernet, it disconnects, then a laptop or same CPE or other device reconnects, the shelf will claim too many MAC addresses. If you set the limit to two, that does not happen. I am guessing that Xmission was giving us a malformed or otherwise unpalatable NTP time hack. Calix reacted by setting the RTC to goofy time. I have never dug into the internals of NTP. I guess the next step would be to wireshark that and figure out what is going on. But Calix should fall back to secondary NTP or freerun if it does not like what it is getting. And give an alarm. I hope to buttonhole the NTP clocking guy in Vegas next week and get some answers.
