On 10/11/06, Dag Wieers dag@wieers.com wrote:
Hi,
I had the following problem today. Because of a misconfigured network switch one system suddenly didn't have any network.
After a reboot (with the network still unavailable) NTPD refused to start. Most likely because the initial ntpdate failed to work. I find this troubling, because when the network was restored, NTPD could have resumed working (like I'd expect from a true daemon).
I too have similar complaints with NTPD on CentOS 3. If any of my CentOS 3 servers lose power, NTPD refuses to start on next boot. If I check the status on the ntpd process, it says process is dead but pid file exists. Server time changes to hwclock, which is usually off 1 hour thanks to daylight savings. Interestingly enough I have never had the problem on a CentOS 4 server.
Now, what was more peculiar was that the hardware clock was completely off. I also had assumed that somehow the hardware clock was kept in sync, but now after rebooting without network, the system clock was skewed.
Is there some way to:
- Make ntpd run, even when no ntp-server could be contacted
- Make ntpd synchronise the hardware clock automatically
PS Yes, I know I can run ntpdate from cron or run hwclock to synchronize my hardware clock. But shouldn't this be part of the infrastructure (either ntpd or the initscripts) ?
That would be a nice feature in the initscript. I've settled for the cron fix for now to keep my hwclock in sync.
Grant