I am doing post-mortem analysis on an NTP related problem in which one host running ntp-4.1.2 gets in a state where it seems to be making large step corrections to its local clock.
When I look at the NTP stats file, I can see that something was terribly wrong with one or more of the NTP servers this host was using. Sometime around 18 August, the clocks of NTP servers 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 began to gradually diverge reaching a difference of over 800 seconds by 8 September. Compounding this problem, the peerstats also shows one of the NTP servers periodically (period of ~900s) being detected as unreachable over the whole duration. The other NTP server had a few sporadic incidences of being unreachable. I have captured all of the ntp configuration and the stats files. Also, I prepared a graph (http://dingo.dogpad.net/ntpProblem/reachableScatter.png) showing the offset of each peer as a function of time. All the stats and config (and the graph) can be found at http://dingo.dogpad.net/ntpProblem. I am a little bit interested in understanding what could have happened with the NTP servers on 18 August. I know that on 8 September, someone changed the configuration of one of the NTP servers (Note: the servers are probably not ntp.org's implementation), which apparently fixed the problem. I am more interested, however, how the my node handled this problem. Before I started digging into the problem, I was under the impression that ntp.org's ntpd never stepped the clock, but only slewed it to correct it. Now I see this is not the default behavior, bu I can achieve this using tinker step 0. However, I read a thread on this newsgroup from Feb 2005 in which David Mills suggested this could produce large offsets and other unpredictable errors. How can I avoid the large clock stepping in this scenario? Is it related to the "prefer" keyword used for 192.168.0.1? Can I safely use "tinker step 0" along with "kernel disable" to prevent step corrections altogether? Can anyone tell me what they think happened to cause the two NTP servers to diverge so quickly? --- Joe Harvell _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
