On 2012-12-08 21:12, unruh wrote:
On 2012-12-08, Jeroen Mostert<jmost...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
If my event log is to be believed, ntpd is adjusting the clock to times in the
past (with pretty big intervals):
<snip>
As I understand it, it's not supposed to be doing this, instead it should slow
the clock down.
No. ntpd jumps the time, forward or backward, if the time is out by more
than 128 microseconds.
I think you mean 128 milliseconds. That's what I'm getting from the docs,
anyway.
I thought ntp could adjust the time forwards in "big" steps, but would never
adjust the time backwards. I'm guessing I got confused with the slew-only option
(-x) for servers that absolutely cannot tolerate the clock going backwards, even
if it takes forever to adjust it through slew only.
Note that both operating systems use the coarse adjust at bootup when
they calibrate the system clock rate. If your timer rate is out by a
lot, you can recalibrate by hand and readjust the system clock rate
using that coarse adjust.
Since this machine more or less serves as a guinea pig/model for deployment in a
network, calibrating stuff by hand is basically not going to be an option in the
production environment. I'm just going to have to count on that working out.
The main question is whether or not your jumping indicates more severe
problems-- ie why is the clock finding itself so far out that it has to
jump. Why is the usual ntpd fixing mechanism not working properly.
Do you get this behaviour only at the beginning, or after ntpd has been
running for days?
At the time of the event, ntpd had been running for 19 hours (same as system
uptime). This is of course not that long in NTP terms. The first clock
adjustment (logged in the event log) came at 40 seconds uptime, then 4 hours
later, and after that it started adjusting about every hour.
With your explanation, I'm perfectly willing to blame crappy network conditions
and/or crappy pool servers on the frequent adjustments. Looking at another
machine, I see zero (0) adjustments there since ntpd was configured to use a
central, local time server (stratum 2). This machine has no time-critical
services, so as long as it's accurate to within 1 sec/day I can't complain. I
was just confused about the clock going backwards.
--
J.
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