[lug] Time (again) sanity check

[Gary Hodges]

Jarrar Jaffari wrote:
> unless there is a "*" before the server name or IP address the 'ntpq -p' 
> does not show that the server is sync'ing with it's source. Also if your 
> time is too much off from the NTP-server then you might wanna do a quick 
> (quantam) fix with either ntpdate or "ntpq".
> 
> Hope this helps.

Interesting.  I had seen characters preceding the name before but hadn't 
given them much thought.  A very brief summary from the ntpq manual 
pages follows:

A space means the peer is rejected.
x  falsetick
.  excess
-  outlyer
+  candidat
#  selected
*  sys.peer
o  pps.peer

I have run ntpdate to that same machine and it apparently works:

hodges at machine:~$ sudo ntpdate  151.61.251.231
25 Jun 12:11:33 ntpdate[2732]: adjust time server 151.61.251.231 offset 
0.003662 sec

I was told yesterday that they know the time is wrong on their machine, 
and they are working on getting approval to set the time.  It will be 
interesting to see if ntp works at that point.



> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 9:01 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us 
> <mailto:anselmi at anselmi.us>> wrote:
> 
>     Gary Hodges wrote:
> 
>         I had to postpone my search for a WWVB or GPS time solution, but
>         as luck would have it the folks running the time server (the one
>         with incorrect time) said they would fix it.  They now claim it
>         has the correct time, but I can't seem to set my computer time
>         correctly with it.
> 
> 
>         hodges at machine:~$ ntpq -p
>             remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay  
>         offset  jitter
>         ==============================================================================
> 
>          mach.nv.doe.go 151.61.251.233 <http://151.61.251.233>   2 u  
>         26   64    5    6.862    0.174 11.644
> 
> 
>     This tells you that you're synced.  In other words your time is set
>     correctly.
> 
>     Why are you worried about this?  Sure, I'm anal and a minute plus
>     would drive me nuts for a machine on the Internet.  But usually I'd
>     care much more that all the machines had the same time (for log
>     comparisons and such) than that they were all just so.  Of course
>     that should be trivial with ntp.
> 
>     Want to hear a sea story?  Well, no, I shouldn't tell the whole
>     thing here.  Suffice to say that some warships, with a myriad of GPS
>     receivers, don't use the GPS signal to sync their computer clocks.
>      They do have NTP servers but only some of them are synced from
>     shore over a radio link.
> 
>     I was amazed.  Especially when a guy in the radio room told me he
>     had no GPS signal there.  So I asked him to walk me through a time
>     sensitive procedure and eventually it lead to him looking at a GPS
>     display that showed not only time and location, but heading, pitch,
>     and roll.  Wow.
> 
>     Dave
> 
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