Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
Eino-Ville Talvala wrote:

Ok,

I've been messing with this for a few weeks, and haven't yet managed to get NTP to where I'd like to be (and where I think it should be able to be).

I'm on an academic network, which has both a university-wide stratum 2 server (actually, a pool of a few servers), and a departmental stratum 3 server. I'm trying to set up a pair of machines that I want synchronized to each other at < 5ms consistently.

Given that the delays between the machines and the servers are on the order of 0.3 ms, I'd expect to be able to maintain offsets at less than 5 ms consistently. However, while my average offset values are usually in that range, I'm seeing RMS offsets on the range of 10-30 ms, with daily peaks around 90 ms for some servers.

Both machines run Centos 4.2, and I've now disabled (temporarily) both the firewall and SELinux protection for ntpd in an attempt to figure out the problem. Here is the ntp.conf file for one machine (with commented out bits removed, and anonymized)

---------------------------------------------

restrict default nomodify notrap
restrict 127.0.0.1

server <UNIVERSITY>
server <DEPARTMENT>
peer <SECOND MACHINE>

# Let's throw in servers from the public pool

server 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
server 2.north-america.pool.ntp.org


driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

statistics loopstats
statsdir /var/log/ntp/
filegen peerstats file peers type day link enable
filegen loopstats file loops type day link enable


-------------------------------------------------

And here's a bit of peerstats (from before I added in the public pool servers):

peers.20060620
ident cnt mean rms max delay dist disp ========================================================================== <UNIVERSITY> 132 -4.089 90.922 986.193 4.340 939.038 30.380 <DEPARTMENT> 137 18.467 27.483 114.025 1.615 939.420 32.474 <SECOND MACHINE> 137 24.696 29.110 59.226 1.236 938.365 25.751
peers.20060621
ident cnt mean rms max delay dist disp ========================================================================== <UNIVERSITY> 84 5.482 21.357 89.828 7.645 45.069 14.830 <DEPARTMENT> 85 10.523 10.672 34.443 4.559 23.647 14.829 <SECOND MACHINE> 84 5.883 5.845 18.113 1.458 31.992 20.572
peers.20060622
ident cnt mean rms max delay dist disp ========================================================================== <UNIVERSITY> 84 -2.083 115.705 931.227 7.427 46.999 14.830 <DEPARTMENT> 84 4.506 7.546 41.621 2.652 39.808 14.828 <SECOND MACHINE> 85 1.590 3.878 14.613 1.384 32.507 18.043

----------------------------------------------------
And here's the driftfile:

-96.459

I'm a little puzzled by the low values of "cnt". With 84-85 samples per day, it looks as if your system is polling the servers at the maximum poll interval of 1024 seconds. Did you, by any chance, tamper with the default values of MINPOLL and MAXPOLL? It's generally a poor idea. Ntpd will adjust the poll interval upwards and downwards as conditions change and as limited by MINPOLL and MAXPOLL. The defaults allow for the conditions usually found. By setting MINPOLL to 10, you force the longer polling interval even when ntpd needs a shorter interval to achieve good synchronization!


I've certainly not intentionally changed it anywhere - if that's an ntp.conf setting, I haven't changed it.

I should clarify a bit - I just added the 3 public pool servers and turned off SELinux protection for ntpd this morning, so I don't yet know if those changes may fix my problem.

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