On Thursday 30 June 2005 02:18, Sid Boyce wrote:
Peter B Van Campen wrote:
Hi,
I have used NTP in previous SUSE 9.X, but on 9.3 I used YAST to set up NTP. YASTs dialog says that it will sync to a time server at bootup. In the past I am sure that the local PC was re-sync'd quite often. I rarely ever saw a difference of more than a second between my "Atomic" wall clock or watch.
But now I see the PCs time getting more and more 'off' the longer it has been booted. This is irritating and non-intuitive. The systems should stay in sync with the 'official' time servers. One should NOT have to re-boot just to get the clock back in sync.
Is the a way to tell the system to regularly 'sync up'? Has anyone out there found a way to keep a 9.3 system time accurate?
PeterB
There were problems with the some kernels around 2.6.10/11. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0412.1/1319.html Recently the timeoday structure has changed in 2.6.12+, but before that, it's been reasonable. In 2.6.12-git10 I'm seeing between -1 and -3 secs drift. When it was really bad I had to set up cron to resync once a minute because ntp wasn't able to sync to the external server. Then I commented out "server 127.127.1.0" in /etc/ntp.conf, forcing sync to the external server, I just noticed I'm still running that way on this 9.3 x86 box. The Mandrake 10.1 and the 9.3 x86_64 laptops have always been rock solid. The Mandrake and 9.3 x86 boxes have the same motherboards. You don't need to reboot to get the time reset, ntpdate or build rdate from source will do that on the fly. I use ptktime to compare time. I'm getting the 0 drift just after I run rdate, must check a few hours later to see how much it's drifted. It was -3 secs after 7 hours uptime, now -1 sec after about 4 minutes. Regards Hi Sid,
Thanks for the reply. My Kernel is the current YAST provided update 2.6.11.4-21.7 and the same in the SMP flavor. The situation here is centered about the SUSE changes in the way service XNTPD handles time sync for the system. The YAST runlevel services editor is set to start xntpd to sync time upon boot, and this is observed being done. Also, I can observe the clock being updated when I use YAST to 'disable and re-enable' the service. But without manual intervention the clock is left to drift until the next boot. This may be fine for infrequently used systems that are booted each time the user wants to use them, but hell on those of us that leave them on all the time. Hi Michael, There is no VM involved on my systems. "ntpq -p" returns "ntpq: read: Connection refused" when the service is disabled and "No association ID's returned" when XNTPD is enabled. "ntptrace" returns "localhost: stratum 16, offset 0.000000, synch distance 0.002145" when XNTPD is enabled and "/usr/sbin/ntpq: read: Connection refused" when disabled. Sid, could you share your cron job to re-sync every minute. Or, is there a way to get the system to regularly re-sync? Thanks, PeterB