[BBLISA] ntp question

[John P. Rouillard]

In message <a96f97250903171322w754083f9u4efb89ccdeea3823 at mail.gmail.com>,
Eric Smith writes:

>I've been digging around for an answer related to an ntp problem but
>not finding it.  We're having some issues that meant the time on the
>two systems were out-of-sync.
>
>I ran ntpq -p on 2 systems and it reported:
>  remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
>============================================================================
>*LOCAL(0)        .LOCL.          10 l   10   64  377    0.000    0.000   0.001
> NetworkServices .INIT.          16 u    - 1024    0    0.000    0.000   0.000
>
>and on the other:
>     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
>=============================================================================
> NetworkServices .STEP.          16 u   81 1024  366    0.807  -73.003 309.922
>*LOCAL(0)        .LOCL.          10 l    4   64  377    0.000    0.000   0.001
>
>It should be stated that not all systems that use NetworkServices to
>sync got messed up.  Some are still working fine.  The later state
>was fixed by stopping and starting ntp.  The first one was not.
>
>I've tried to figure out what those "refid" values mean.  After much
>google'ing I found STEP meant the skew was too large to do increments.

Which is odd since 73ms should be easily correctible (in fact most pc
clocks can't maintain much better time). However is that is 73
seconds, then yeah that's too far out.

>I'm assuming when I stopped and restarted it that caused it to just
>slam the time.  Even if not, clearly it's working now as
>NetworkServices is back to stratum 3 and working fine.
>
>I can't find anything about what INIT means.  Does anyone know?
>Anyone seen something like this before and knows how to fix it?
>Heck, I'd even take a resource that actually told me what all the
>legal values are for refid!  hat might send me in the right direction

The refid is the server that "NetworkServices" is getting it's time
from.  E.G.

blade71(529)% /usr/sbin/ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset    disp
==============================================================================
*nts200          .GPS.            1 u  271  512  377     4.85    1.939    0.78
+blade60         nts200           2 u  281  512  377     0.47    2.025    0.63
+blade30         nts200           2 u  341  512  377     0.56    0.228    0.34

nts200 is getting it's time from a GPS receiver where blade60 and
blade 30 are getting their times from nts200.

.INIT. means that it is trying to intialize its connection to that
server. Look at the reach column for the .INIT. entry for
NetworkServices,

>  remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
> NetworkServices .INIT.       16 u    - 1024    0    0.000    0.000   0.000

it's 0 - i.e. it can't contact that server. Maybe you have a DNS/WINS
problem (so it can't find the server ip) or firewall blocking the
traffic. Another key is the st (stratum) of 16. That basically means
that the server isn't synchronized to anything and is the default
(bottom of the pile) stratum for any new server.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===========================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.