[CentOS] NTP and hardware clock
Grant McChesney
grantmc at gmail.com
Wed Oct 11 17:57:48 UTC 2006
On 10/11/06, Dag Wieers <dag at 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
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