On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Karl Fife <[email protected]> wrote: > We're running Embedded 1.2.3 on Soekris 5501. > > We ran into a funny situation last week where ntpd was failing to sync even > though the stratum 1 ntp server was reachable, and the OpenNPT service was > running. pfSense offset grew by about 2 seconds per day, and our ntp > clients were in dutiful lockstep with this drift. Restarting the OpenNTP > service didn't seem to trigger a resync, but forcing a sync from the command > line did seem eliminate the (eventual) 38 second offset. However, even > after the explicit resync, windows clients wouldn't sync, complaining that > the time server (pfSense) had not resync'd recently enough. This message > persisted even after subsequent "forced resyncs" (resyncs that resulted in > <.01 sec offset correction). > > Later that evening (after the elves had gone home) I simply rebooted > pfSense, and today it all seems to be syncing, and all of our network clocks > (appliances) and windows clients seem to be syncing nicely with no > complaints. Naturally I went to check the logs, but I was somewhat > surprised to see that /var/log/ntpd.log was empty. Is there a different log > file I should be checking? > > Has anyone else has seen OpenNTPD fail similarly? I've never seen my other > pfSense instances drift by more than a few hundred milliseconds. We have > some market traders that rely on a very reliable real time clock for market > close. I'd appreciate any tips.
While it generally works, openntpd tends to do stupid things at times and has a number of limitations. We've been discussing alternatives recently, looks like we'll switch back to the stock ntpd for 2.0. One time guru FreeBSD developer who is a pfSense user switched his out to the stock ntpd at his day job, a HFT company, where timing is extremely crucial. You may want to consider the same, though you'd have to manually hack it in it's not a whole lot of effort if you know FreeBSD. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
