[NBLUG/talk] NTP troubles

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Tue Mar 15 19:13:19 PST 2005


On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 06:32:06PM -0800, Peter Lutz wrote:
> I run a couple of Debian Unstable boxen here which get upgraded very
> frequently.  

Scary.  Debian Unstable is *really* intended only for developers.  It's
quite possible that they broke something in unstable.

[snip]
> server no longer works.  I have 1)rebooted.  2)removed and reinstalled
> three packages: ntp, ntp-server, and ntp-simple. 3)removed --purge and
> reinstalled the three packages.  And the problem is only on the older
> box, that I use for my server.  The other unstable box has the same
> three programs and it works just fine.
[snip]
> time Windoz2000, so it's not a good candidate for a time server for the
> other CPU's here.
[snip]
> There are strange symptoms.  When I run /etc/init.d/ntp-server restart,
> ntpd seems to run once or some such.  I get one entry in loopstats and
> peerstats.  I get no error messages, but ps ax | grep ntpd shows nothing
> running.  There is a /var/run/ntpd.pid file that remains, but that seems
> to be the only remnant of ntpd, other than the log entries.

Well...  I can think of a couple of things to look at...

1) Does /var/log/syslog have anything from ntpd in it?  ntpd may be saying
why it's quitting there.

2) Try installing the "ntpdate" package, and run "/etc/init.d/ntpdate start
; /etc/init.d/ntp-server start".

One thing about ntpd is that it only works when your system time is within
a threshold (15 minutes, IIRC) of "real time", otherwise it assumes that the
time difference could potentially be due to incorrect time zone settings and
refuses to run.

The "ntpdate" program has no such problem.  It simply assumes that you
really want the time set to whatever your ntp time servers say it should be.

So if you run 'ntpdate' right before starting ntpd, it should bypass that
problem.

(note: I don't know that that's the issue, it's just kinda what this problem
sounds like it could be...)
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit



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