Sorry for jumping in so late. In my opinion the basic concept of the local clock driver was good, easy to configure, sufficient for small, simple networks, and it just worked as expected in older versions of ntpd.
As David Woolley has pointed out in one of his comments, the local clock can perfectly be used with stratum 0 if the system time is disciplined accurately outside of NTP, so ntpd is just used to make the disciplined time available on the LAN. There *are* networks out there where this configuration is used. Of course orphan mode works better than a simple local clock setup if you have a network with several redundant servers and/or refclocks which need to keep time very reliably under all circumstances, but this requires a version of ntpd running on those orphan nodes where orphan mode really works as expected, and is IMO very much harder to configure for unexperienced users. So if you have just a simple network where one NTP node synchronizes to a single refclock or one or more internet NTP servers, and you just want your clients to keep the same time if your refclock is temporarily unsynchronized or your internet connection is temporarily down, then the local clock driver used to be the perfect solution. I know from many customers that they consider such a solution as good enough. The original poster said in one of his comments: > My machine is the server for other nodes[blades] in the cluster. > So it is not a leaf machine. So it looks like he was just trying to install this simple setup. If in current versions of ntpd the local clock stays selected as system peer after the daemon has started even though good upstream time sources are available, or if it "eats up the -g flag" after startup so ntpd terminates itself when remote servers become available and the initial time offset exceeds the sanity limit, then in my opinion the local clock driver is just broken in the current version of ntpd and should be fixed. I don't know if what the OP has found out could already be part of a fix. As said above, this used to work perfectly with older versions, and it should be up to the user if they are satisfied with a simple, easy configuration, or if they want a more enhanced configuration requiring much more basic knowledge to get it working as expected. Martin -- Martin Burnicki Meinberg Funkuhren Bad Pyrmont Germany _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
