[comp.protocols.time.ntp] xntpd on convex/sgi/3090?

Mills@udel.edu (01/03/91)

Folks,

I can't help Nathan, since I am creatively allthumbs with respect
to Unix gurudom. Could somebody help? In response, I would be glad
to receive and archive reports of successful ports. It would be a
good idea anyway and help offload those of you who have been so
helpful in the past.

Dave

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From: "Nathan H. Hillery" <hillery@ncsc.org>
Message-Id: <9101022003.AA22369@osprey.ncsc.org>
To: mills@udel.edu
Subject: xntpd on convex/sgi/3090?


Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you knew of anyone
who has gotten xntpd to work on Convex's, SGI's, or IBM3090's.  

I have gotten the standard distribution to compile (with a minor
change since Convex's UNIX includes getopt() in libc), but it doesn't
seem to adjust the time at all.  I cannot get "tickadj -s" to run, since
there is no "dosynctodr" symbol.  I assume that this is the problem.
The system has an adjtime() system call and the variables "tick" and
"tickadj".

I have run into the same problem on our IBM3090 running AIX.  It doesn't
use any of the BSD-style names for the kernel time-keeping variables.

I haven't looked as much at our Silicon Graphics, but know (and have
heard from others) that standard xntpd won't work.  It appears to
have the kernel variable "tick", but nothing else.  It has something
called "timetrim" which may be like tickadj.

				Thanks for any information,
						Nate.
 ..............................................................................
 .	Nathan H. Hillery 	North Carolina Supercomputing Center (NCSC)   .
 .	hillery@ncsc.org	P.O. Box 12889				      .
 .	Voice: 919/ 248-1106	3021 Cornwallis Road			      .
 .	FAX:   919/ 248-1101	Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889	      .
 ..............................................................................

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iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) (01/03/91)

In article <9101021547.aa24657@huey.udel.edu> Mills@udel.edu writes:
>Folks,
>
>I can't help Nathan, since I am creatively allthumbs with respect
>to Unix gurudom. Could somebody help? In response, I would be glad
>to receive and archive reports of successful ports. It would be a
>good idea anyway and help offload those of you who have been so
>helpful in the past.

I have ntp (not xntp) running on our Convex C240.  It's been a while
since I built it, but I don't remember doing anything special to make
it work.  Our Convex was losing 4 seconds a day before we started
running ntp on it.


Mike Iglesias
University of California, Irvine
Internet:    iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu
BITNET:      iglesias@uci
uucp:        ...!ucbvax!ucivax!iglesias

jones@HERMES.CHPC.UTEXAS.EDU (01/03/91)

If you are running an older convex c120`s, c130`s, and
older c200's then you have a problem.   The older
machines loose clock interrupts when they
talk to the spu because of a kernel "printf".
The two most common cases that a convex
looses time because of a printf 
the settimeofday function and nfs errors - timeouts.

The settimeofday function loose about 200 ms because
of the messages the is sent to the spu.  Which
is bad since this is larger then 128 ms which
means that xntp and ntp will always stay
unsynchronized. You can get a patch to noop the printf
in the settimeofday function.

If you have a lot of nfs mounts you will also see
about a 200 ms glitch in the time every time
you have a nfs error.

If you have a real new convex, we have a convex C220
wide body, then you may not see the above problems.

If you don't have a lot of nfs errors I would suggest
getting the settimeofday patch from convex.

You don't have to run tickadj with the "-s" option, its
not needed.  Just run tickadj with the "-A" option or
the "-a" option to set the tickadj to a smaller value then
1 ms.


Bill Jones

whaley@elbo.ucs.ubc.ca (Paul Whaley) (01/03/91)

In article <9101021547.aa24657@huey.udel.edu>, Mills@udel.edu writes:...
|> to Unix gurudom. Could somebody help? In response, I would be glad...
|> From: "Nathan H. Hillery" <hillery@ncsc.org>
|> Subject: xntpd on convex/sgi/3090?
|> Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you knew of anyone
|> who has gotten xntpd to work on Convex's, SGI's, or IBM3090's. ...

|> I have run into the same problem on our IBM3090 running AIX.  It doesn't
|> use any of the BSD-style names for the kernel time-keeping variables.

We have tried to run ntpd on AIX/370, with no success. I tracked it down to
problems in the adjtime system call, which seems to be so broken that there
is no way to get ntp or xntp to run. Calls to adjtime to make small changes
(microseconds) in the time-of-day result in a time that is too small by
seconds. After a few hours of running ntpd, the clock is so far off that ntpd
gives up. This is on AIX/370 with updates PTF U401122 installed (alias 
AIX/370 01.02.0300). We reported the problem to IBM at the end of October,
but have had no reply yet. Until it's fixed, we are using the ntpdate program
from the xntp distribution. The ntpd program does seem to run fine on
AIX PS/2, after adjustment for the errors in conversions BOTH WAYS between
float and unsigned long, and a fix for the little-endian placement of
int:8.

|> I haven't looked as much at our Silicon Graphics, but know (and have
|> heard from others) that standard xntpd won't work. ...

We are running ntpd on our Silicon Graphics 4D25s with IRIX 3.3.0, without
any apparent problem. It has to be compiled for the BSD signal semantics:
(in the Makefile:
INCPATH= -I/usr/include/bsd
LIBS= -lbsd -lmld
CC=cc -g
FEATURES= -DDEBUG
DEFINES= -D_BSD_SIGNALS 
)
We haven't tried xntpd on the SGI's or IBM/3090. 

-- 
Paul Whaley                   Internet: whaley@ucs.ubc.ca
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