On Mar 13, 2012, at 4:08 PM, Ron Frazier (NTP) wrote: > I was speculating that perhaps my only selectable clock, the GPS, failed, and > that something went nuts, and that's why I found the clock 50 seconds off > this morning. However, I don't have any evidence of a GPS failure. In any > case, I just figured the local option might prevent any major clock changes > if all other sources are not available. I only wanted the local option to > kick in if there were no other sources. I did not have that option in the > ntp.conf file when I started this thread. When I started this thread, my GPS > was the only selectable clock, and there was no local option.
One problem is that the local clock will always claim to be perfectly sync'ed, regardless of how close or far from "real time" it actually happens to be. The fact that ntpd's stats will look wonderful doesn't mean anything in this case. If you configured a reasonable # of internet NTP servers, and maybe your GPS in noselect mode while you try to debug whatever the issue is with it, you'd likely avoid a number of the issues you've been reporting. > For now, I'm mainly wanting to compare the GPS to one primary other source > because I've been experiencing a slow drift in NMEA time with a variation of > about 120 ms and an oscillation period of several days. I'm trying to > isolate the source, either the GPS, or the subsystem that's getting time from > the internet servers. I'm assuming all the internet servers are not > drifting, but my instrumentation, ie the Meinberg time server monitor, or > whatever drives it, could be off. That's why only have one source > selectable, either the GPS, or one NIST server. Well, it's hardly unexpected that the NMEA sentences would show variable timing; they are only supposed to be correct to the nearest second, so 120 ms is well within specs. It's the PPS signal which is expected to provide sub-millisecond precision. [ Hasn't this already been discussed? ] Regards, -- -Chuck _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
