Re: Clock running slow

[Donald R. Spoon]

Bill Moseley wrote:

I setup a machine for a friend and every few days I ssh in to see how
things look.  Twice now I have found the date about twenty minutes behind.
The first time I found this I ran ntpdate, made sure the hwclock was
updated, restarted ntp-simple and thought the problem was fixed.  I just
checked again and it's twenty minutes slow again.  The machine has not been
restarted for ten days.

This is on an old Dell PIII machine.

What steps should I follow to reset the clock (and hwclock)?  Do I need to
remove or reset a drift file?  What could cause the clock to get that far
behind while ntpd is running?

I can see that ntp is running from ps, and I see the drift file being
written to (just a few minutes ago):

$ ls -l /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            7 Dec  4 20:08 /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift

although /var/log/ntpstats/loopstats is old (maybe that's run once a day?)

-rw-r--r--    2 root     root         1423 Dec  3 01:03 loopstats

Thanks,

Sounds like NTPDATE is working OK, but NTP isn't...right?

Based on some past experience here, I would recommend looking at any firewall rules to see if port 123 is blocked! I had this problem, and discovered that NTPDATE would update just fine with it blocked, but NTP just wouldn't sync. If it is blocked, open it (port 123), stop NTP and re-run NTPDATE to get the HW clock in synch, then re-start NTP and see if it goes away. I always made things worse by messing around with the drift file....

My loopstats file seems to be updated about every 6 hours here....

Cheers,
-Don Spoon-



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]