On Jun 9, 2009, at 8:30 PM, Danny Mayer wrote:
> Scott Haneda wrote:
>> Hello, I am not sure this is the correct list, but it is the
>> closest I
>> could find. I hope there is someone here who can at least point me
>> in
>> the correct direction.
>>
>> I am having trouble with `ntpdate` on OS X, using version
>>
>> $ntpdate -v
>> 1 Jun 20:03:47 ntpdate[1008]: ntpdate [email protected] Thu Feb 5
>> 07:51:24 UTC 2009 (1)
>>
>> Is this the correct place?
>> Thanks
>
> Yes, but what's the question?
I am only looking for the basics of keeping my system clock in sync on
OS X 10.5. On OS X 10.5 the clock will drift badly on a machine that
is not logged in. If you log in, it is less of a problem, but the
date and time parts of OS X do not check into the time servers nearly
often enough. An idle machine is usually fine, but certain types of
applications can stall the OS, and in turn, stall the clock. For a
server, this makes log files a royal pain to deal with timestamps.
I run, on a schedule, with launchd, which can be thought of as a cron
like scheduler for OS X, once an hour, and also, when the machine
boots. Launchd can be told to run on load as well. I sleep the
script long enough for all interfaces to come up.
Here is my command:
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -u
This works fine, all the time, sans one exception. If the machine has
a kernel panic, or some form of more serious crash, it will come up
with the date and time set to 1969, which I believe is Apple's epoch
( December 31, 1969, at 4 pm PST )
This happens on all OS X machines, I have only tested on 10.4 and
10.5, and only on PPC hardware, I do not have a way to get the date
and time to fall into 1969 on an Intel machine.
When this happens, I can see in my syslog, that /usr/sbin/ntpdate -u
is called, on the normal schedule, but the date and time is never
synced. At first I thought I needed to tell it I will allow ntpdate
to jump huge ranges of times, but I do not believe that to be the case.
Syslog tells me, as a normal working result:
Jun 10 00:40:48 moses com.domain.ntpdate[78719]: 10 Jun 00:40:48
ntpdate[78741]: adjust time server 17.151.16.21 offset -0.070716 sec
* That is actually the output of launchd to syslog, lunachd just
passes the output of a command into syslog.
Here is a failure line, after I had a kernel panic.
Dec 31 16:00:54 host-domain-com com.apple.launchd[1] >>
(com.domain.ntpdate[50]): Exited with exit code: 1
What is exit code 1 of ntpdate?
Interestingly, all I have to do to solve this, is ssh in, and run /usr/
sbin/ntpdate -u, at which point, the lunachd scheduler will have no
issue with it on the next run. I can not find any way to do this
without user intervention. Being on a email server, I get a lot of
calls that their emails are dated wrong.
I first confirmed with the launchd mailing list that this was not an
issue with launchd, and they felt certain it was not. This I am not
sure sure of, since if I can call the same command by hand, and
lunachd is doing the exact same thing, it makes it confusing as to
where the issue is.
Any more data, would help a lot, if it turns out to not be a ntpdate
issue, I need something to go back with to the launchd list.
Thank you
--
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *
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