Help: NTP. What could be wrong?

[leekb]

I configured 2 Solaris machines, namely C-a and C-b to NTP sync with a Solaris NTP server, S-ntp.

Everything worked fine after the configuration. 'ntpq -p' output shows that both C-a and C-b are synchronized to S-ntp. Visual check of system clocks between C-a, C-b, and S-ntp were a'ok.

After a few days, system clocks of C-a and C-b started to diff by 20~30 seconds. But 'ntpq -p' output of both clients still appear to be in good sync (asterisks presence).

What could be wrong?

thanks in advance.

 

[Annihilannic]

Is xntpd running? Annihilannic.

 

[leekb]

Yes. xntpd is running. Any other idea?

 

[Annihilannic]

Perhaps you should stop it and run it temporarily against your terminal in debugging mode using xntpd -d (any any other switches it normally uses at startup) to see why it's not taking any action.

Sometimes xntpd won't update the clock if its out by too much as it could confuse applications running on your system. Annihilannic.

 

[leekb]

I found a couple of /usr/sbin/xntpx processes in machine C-a. What are these things?

I tried running 'xntpd -d -l /tmp/xntp.log'. xntpd process died within 10 seconds.

 

[Annihilannic]

I've not seen xntpx before... are you sure it's not xntpc?

What did it put in the log file? Had you stopped the running xntpd first? Annihilannic.

 

[leekb]

It is indeed "xntpx". When I run '/etc/init.d/xntpd stop', the xntpd process would terminate. But xntpx processes would remain.

I restarted ntp by:

1) cp xntpd xntpd_debug
2) edit xntpd_debug to include -d -l options
3) /etc/init.d/xntpd stop
4) /etc/init.d/xntpd_debug start

---

The content of the log file:

---start of log
4 Mar 19:06:45 xntpd[26125]: logging to file /tmp/xntpd.log
4 Mar 19:06:45 xntpd[26125]: xntpd version=3.4y (beta multicast); Fri Aug 23 19:54:40 PDT 1996 (2)
4 Mar 19:06:45 xntpd[26125]: tickadj = 625, tick = 10000, tvu_maxslew = 61875
4 Mar 19:06:45 xntpd[26125]: precision = 48 usec
4 Mar 19:06:45 xntpd[26125]: NTP user interface routines not configured in this kernel.
---end of log

... at the mean time, xntpd process terminates.

 

[J1mbo]

Google found this:

http://aa11.cjb.net/sun_managers/1999/11/msg00270.html

-jim

 

[leekb]

J1mbo, thanks for the link. I installed the patch a moment ago. Hope this resolves the problem. Will be updating everyone here soon.

 

[leekb]

NTP has been working as expected after the patch. Thanks everyone.