awy@concurrent.co.UK (Alan Young) (03/08/91)
Running ntpd (manual page dated 15 June 1989) on a Sun4 sparcstation running SunOS 4.0.1c I can get in sync with another host and get the offset down to something reasonable (< 100 ms) with a dispersion in the thousands. Then the dispersion suddenly goes out to 64000 and we are out of sync for a couple of minutes. This cycle repeats about every 5 minutes. The offset often goes out to as much as 5s. Someone suggested that this may be a know problem (with solution): any ideas? Also, in the simple ntpdc display, the man page describes what '-' & '*' at the start of a line mean, but what about '+'? Please reply directly as I am not on the ntp list. Alan Young.
deering@parc.xerox.com (Steve Deering) (03/10/91)
> Running ntpd (manual page dated 15 June 1989) on a Sun4 sparcstation > running SunOS 4.0.1c I can get in sync with another host and get the > offset down to something reasonable (< 100 ms) with a dispersion in the > thousands. Then the dispersion suddenly goes out to 64000 and we are > out of sync for a couple of minutes. This cycle repeats about every 5 > minutes. The offset often goes out to as much as 5s. Someone suggested > that this may be a know problem (with solution): any ideas? > > Alan Young. This is a consequence of one or more known problems with the sparcstation timekeeping code, which I don't have enough time to describe right now. (If the NTP mailing list is archived somewhere, you might be able to dig up some old messages giving the gory details.) But I will tell you what works for us at Xerox PARC and on Dartnet: we use the xntpd daemon from the Univ. of Toronto on our sparcstations. Included in the xntpd release is a program called "tickadj" that must be run at boot time (before running xntpd) as follows: tickadj -As -t 9999 See the tickadj man page for an explanation. With this setup, we usually see offsets less than 1 msec and dispersions less than 2 on our sparcstations (models 1, 1+ and 2). One more thing: if you are using the the sparcstation screen for console output, make sure you are running a window system on that screen, rather than the plain ROM monitor. Output via the ROM routines can cause many clock interrupts to be lost. Steve Deering deering@xerox.com
deering@parc.xerox.com (Steve Deering) (03/10/91)
> What version of SunOS are you running? There is little problem in running > xntpd under 4.1, the question is whether it will run under 4.0.x. > > Mohamed Oops, you're right -- I overlooked the fact that Alan was asking about SunOS 4.0.1c. We are running 4.1 and 4.1.1. If xntpd won't run on 4.0.x (is this known to be true?), Alan might still try running tickadj as I described, before starting up ntpd. It just might work. Steve
mrp@ucs.adelaide.edu.au (03/11/91)
> What version of SunOS are you running? There is little problem in running > xntpd under 4.1, the question is whether it will run under 4.0.x. > > Mohamed Oops, you're right -- I overlooked the fact that Alan was asking about SunOS 4.0.1c. We are running 4.1 and 4.1.1. If xntpd won't run on 4.0.x (is this known to be true?), Alan might still try running tickadj as I described, before starting up ntpd. It just might work. I have had no problems, except the "previous time adjustment didn't complete" nuisance, running it under 4.0.3. Mark.
prl@iti.org (Peter Lamb) (03/11/91)
deering@parc.xerox.com (Steve Deering) writes: >If xntpd won't run on 4.0.x (is this known to be true?), Alan might still try >running tickadj as I described, before starting up ntpd. It just might work. We run xntpd on 4.0.3. Sun's clocks aren't wonderful, but we haven't had any major problem. We run `tickadj -A -s -q' at boot time. Peter Lamb (prl@iis.ethz.ch) -- Peter Lamb uucp: uunet!mcsun!ethz!prl eunet: prl@iis.ethz.ch Tel: +411 256 5241 Integrated Systems Laboratory ETH-Zentrum, 8092 Zurich