[comp.protocols.time.ntp] Wanted: help with xntp on Sparc's

lmjm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Lee McLoughlin) (10/11/90)

I am trying to setup xntp locally.  As we are in the UK we are far
from any usable internet clock and little chance of getting a decent
radio clock to link to one of the GMT servers over here.

So I decided to, as an initial test, to run xntp between three
machines:
	Processor		OS		Name
	---------		--		----
	Sparc 4/380		Sunos 4.1	(stork)
	Sparc 1+		Sunos 4.1	(crane)
	Gould Powernode 9080	UTX/32 2.1A	(gould)

The gould has a useless clock so I just run ntpdate on it every ten
minutes querying stork and crane.

The system clock on stork is the master clock.  Stork has a config file of:
	server		127.127.1.1
	driftfile	/var/adm/ntp.drift

Crane has a config file of:
	server		129.31.103.3		# stork
	peer		129.31.103.1		# crane
	driftfile	/var/adm/ntp.drift

I currently have two problems.  Firstly xntpd doesn't seem to issue
time till after running for about 8.5 minutes.  According to xntpdc
for the first 8.5 mins after startup neither stork nor crane has
selected peers.  Is this what it should be doing?? I've tried reading
the NTP (Version 2) document but it is a bit heavy going and I've not
found anything which suggests this is the way it should work.

My second problem is that the once both crane and stork's xntpd's are
talking with each other  the times do not seem to stay as much in sync
as I had hoped.  Ignoring the gould whose time bounces about all over
the place.  I expected crane's clock to stay within 20-30 ms of stork.
However when the crane gets busy (like during a nightly dump or when
the students are about) it can be as far as 3-4 seconds out (according
to timedc'd clockdiff command).

I couldn't find a revision number in the xntp sources but the
compressed tar file is identical to that held at toronto.edu (491419
bytes).

If some kindly guru could suggest what might be causing the above
problems I'd really appreciate it.

	Lee
--
--
Lee McLoughlin		phone: 071 589 5111 X 5037  	fax: 071 581 8024
Department of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queens Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK
Janet: lmjm@uk.ac.ic.doc	Uucp:  lmjm@icdoc.UUCP (or ..!ukc!icdoc!lmjm)
DARPA: lmjm@doc.ic.ac.uk (or lmjm%uk.ac.ic.doc@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk)

J.Crowcroft@ucl-cs.UUCP (10/19/90)

From: Jon Crowcroft <J.Crowcroft@uk.ac.ucl.cs>



Lee,

 if you can stand the memory loss, i can give you NTP on ROS (using
ISODE - runs on a sun, takes about 1Mbyte), and you
could peer over JANET with one of our machines (we then also talk NTP
to US, brunel, nottingham and cambridge) - or if you get someone to buy some 
ethernet-remote bridges, you could come over the 2Mbps livenet digital 
path to us, and thence direct to the US with no interference from the JNT...


 jon