[CentOS] Strange NTP problem

Thu May 22 15:21:50 UTC 2008
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

I'm still having this issue.  Here is another update.  I noticed that  
the drift file for the system with the problem contained "0.000".  On  
most other systems this contains a positive number (and on two a  
negative number).  I deleted the drift file, resynch'ed the time with  
"ntpdate <hostname>", restarted the NTP daemon, and waited for the  
drift file to be recreated.  It again contained "0.000" and the  
output of "ntpq -np looked like this:

        remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay    
offset  jitter
    
======================================================================== 
======
    10.101.32.104   67.128.71.65     3 u   49   64  377    0.611   
1871.40 987.132
   *127.127.1.0     .LOCL.          10 l   48   64  377    0.000     
0.000   0.001

I replaced the drift file with the contents of the file before the  
upgrade to CentOS, resynch'ed the time, and restarted the NTP  
daemon.  But after a little while, the system is "bound" to itself  
again.

BTW, the output of the cron job running ntpdate once an hour showed  
that the system has a very steady drift of 14.9 seconds every hour.   
Does that seem excessive?  NTP should be able to handle this, right?

Alfred