Re: [gentoo-user] Re: System Clock Problems

[Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net>]

On 2/13/2006 12:22 PM Mark Knecht wrote:
> On 2/13/06, Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Anyway, I really appreciate your thoughts.  Because this box runs
>> MythTV, time is *VERY* important.  Imagine my surprise when I went to
>> watch the first day of the Olympics on to find out that my recordings
>> were off by over an hour and half.  :)
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Drew
>>     
>
> Drew,
>    Please excuse me jumping in here. I have seen no other emails in
> this thread so maybe I'm wasting time. I hope not.
>   

Thanks for jumping in.  I'll try any suggestions at this point.  :)

> I have a number of Gentoo machines. For some reason in the last
> week or 10 days my AMD64 machine stopped keeping time. I'd boot it in
> the morning and even the day would be off. It was horrible.
>
>    With a little help from others I found that, at least in my case, I
> needed to start running ntp-client in the default run level. I never
> ran this before but there appears to have been change recently that
> has made it more important. Either that or I was just lucky before.
>   

This leads me to believe that your issues are related to the initial 
step being beyond the 1000 second limit by default.  I thought about 
this and thought the '-g' switch would override any such limit.  I have 
also tried your suggestion in my testing.  Not specifically by enabling 
ntp-client but by running ntpdate from the command line and then 
immediately running ntpd -A -d from the command line.  Still, no sync.

>    I've since added ntp-client on all the machines and things are now
> dead on as far as I can tell.
>
>    One other thing that was recommended to me was to remove the
> /etc/adjust file when doing this. I did that also.
>   

I don't seem to have one of these.

>    Again, if all of this has already been covered I apologize for
> taking up too much time.

No, this hasn't been covered and they're good suggestions.  I have a bit 
of an update.  In experimenting, I tried both "broadcastclient" and 
"server 192.168.1.2" (my time server machine) in ntp.conf.  Neither 
worked.  However, I read the man page for ntpd and came across the 
options of 'burst" and "iburst".  I added both of these options so now 
my ntp.conf contains the line "server 192.168.1.2 burst iburst".  This 
seems to work but I don't understand why.  One thing I noticed is that 
'ntpd -d' output shows a "burst" of many communications between my 
Gentoo box and my time server each time it communicates.  This results 
in a sync most of the time.  However my ntp.log file shows entries such 
as this:

13 Feb 19:11:20 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:12:10 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:12:24 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:13:13 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:13:27 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:14:16 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:14:32 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:15:22 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:15:36 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:16:27 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:16:41 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:17:31 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:17:45 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:18:34 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:18:48 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:19:39 ntpd[8830]: no servers reachable
13 Feb 19:19:53 ntpd[8830]: synchronized to 192.168.1.2, stratum 2
13 Feb 19:19:01 ntpd[8830]: time reset -52.104173 s

The "no servers reachable" bothers me a bit.  Is this indicative of a 
network issue and thus, the cause of my trouble?  Both my Gentoo box and 
my time server are on a 100 mbps LAN and so there should not be a 
"reachable" issue.

Just trying to understand...

Thanks,

Drew

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