On 10/11/06, Dag Wieers dag@wieers.com wrote:
On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, mike.redan@bell.ca wrote:
The whole point of ntpdate is to synchronize the local clock with another source (ie. not the local clock).
And I guess the main reason why they do not start ntpd if ntpdate fails, is because they have to protect other ntp clients from being poisoned by a wrong system clock upstream (because its source is unavailable).
Hrm. What does your initscript look like for ntpd? Ie which version? I just had a look around at some RHEL3.x and 4.x (as well as some CentOS ones) and none of them will refuse to start ntpd if the ntpdate run fails. The only thing they do when ntpdate fails is add the "-g" option, which will let ntpd jump the clock more than 1000s. But no matter what, ntpd will start.
You're correct. Then I have no idea why ntpd was not running.
/me puts on his ntpd hat.
ntpd will not start running if it finds it can't make a gradual change to the clock to bring it into sync. This occurs when the clock is over 1000s or the TOY chip is not responding in a way that the ntpd knows how. [If hwclock --systohc says it sets the clock but you see it doesnt.. then it can be a hardware problem of many types.]
The most common reason I found ntpd not running is that it found its time all of a sudden over 1000s for some reason it didnt know about (changing timezone on the box or bad hz rate from hardware.)