Thanks to everyone for responding on this thread. I'll attempt to answer the questions asked by others on my original mail. It'll be great if people can write constructively rather than using keywords like 'idiotic' etc which serve no useful purpose and only motivate me to just ignore your email.
* There were some questions on why my ntp.conf uses the local time source 127.127.1.0. This question is irrelevant to this discussion, which focuses on why 'ntpd -q -g' is slow. Anyways, the reason this was added was because if the server at 10.50.33.100 is down, then we found that ntpd would hang - but if the lines concerning 127.127.1.0 was there, the ntpd would still make progress if the external NTP server was down. * Someone suggested just running 'ntpd' and not the oneshot 'ntpd -q -g'. Again, not relevant to this discussion. But the answer is that the machine needs to start with the clock roughly synchronized - its ok to be running 'ntpd' in the background later. * There were some questions on what I'm trying to do here. Basically we sell a distributed platform containing multiple machines arrange in a master-slave architecture. The slaves need to be sync'd with the master when they start up. Slow bootup times are unacceptable - specially wasting 3 minutes just to synchronize clocks is not ok. So the slaves need to quickly update the clock to roughly the same time as the master, and then later its ok for them to run ntp in the background. Since this is a custom environment, the slaves are totally willing to accept the master as the NTP source (the master is at IP address 10.50.33.100). So there's no reason for the ntp client at the slaves to not believe the first reply they see from the master. * Someone mentioned that they're seeing sync'up times of 11s with 'ntpd -q -g'. Well, congratulations - unfortunately I'm not. And even if I was, I'd even call that slow. Wasting 11s on time synchronization during bootup is still unacceptable - this translates into the equivalent amount of downtime for our clients. I'm using ntpd version 4.2.4p4 running on Gentoo Linux - seems like that's a pretty recent version. I can imagine a huge hue and cry if ntpdate is actually removed - given the current slowness of 'ntpd -q -g'. The maintainers are welcome to remove it - but given the current state, people will just dig up the old source, or hack up a new one and keep using that until ntpd itself provides equivalent support inside it. - Mohit _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
