stevo@ELROY.JPL.NASA.GOV (Steve Groom) (04/26/91)
I've got a small problem running xntpd on a small subnet here. There problem is that occasionally, xntpd (through ntpq or xntpdc) will say that a particular host hasn't been reached in some long period of time, several hours or even days. However, I know that the machines are both up and running, and xntpd is otherwise healthy. Right now, I've got two machines which have been peering with each other successfully for quite a while (about a year), and although they're both up and running fine, each machine shows the other as unreachable. On both of the machines, "reach" is 0. On one of them, "when" is 25h, but on the other it's less than 1000. I know there's nothing wrong with the network, these machines are physically only about 10 feet apart and everything else about them works fine (rlogin, NFS, etc). Usually, if I unconfigure the other peer from each machine, wait a few minutes, then reconfigure them, it comes back to life. Sometimes it seems to come back to life on it's own after a while. As an additional oddity, sometimes I see one host thinking the other is dead, but the other one sees the first one OK. Strange. I've seen this both between internal hosts, and between internal and external hosts, at times when everything else about NTP seemed to be working just fine on both ends. I can ping them manually (and ntpq them), but the xntpd's aren't cooperating. Could it be something wrong in my "restrict" statements in the config file? If that was the problem, why would it only happen sometimes, and why would it sometimes just go away again after a while? Any clues would be appreciated. This is mostly a curiosity, it's not causing any other problems that I know of. -steve