On 11/05/12 14:41, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
ISTR something about NTP having trouble if the H/W clock and system time were vastly different, but I'd have thought it could cope with 15 mins, but more to the point, why are they different if NTP is working? Can you manually set both to more or less the correct time, and then see what happens?
I've just been reading about how the two are synchronised. As I understand it the kernel has an option to sync the hwclock to system clock every 11 minutes, which is disabled by default but enabled by things like ntp. So that should keep the system clock up to date.
However when I posted, it was hwclock (not system clock) that was right.
What I am sure about is that apart from at startup, hardware clock plays in part in the system operation, so it could do whatever it likes and make no difference other than the clock being wrong on startup (until ntp corrects it). So that should rule out a hardware clock issue (such as battery).
http://linux.die.net/man/8/ntpd if you kill the deamon, run it from a prompt, and use -d or -dd or -ddd etc for more levels of debug logging.
OK, that'll be the next thing I try after turning ntp off to see if the problem goes away (it's been OK for about 20 mins but that's not long enough to test).
As to logging to a separate file, I misread the config file - you can log the statistics to a file if you want by having statsdir /var/log/ntpstats/ in the conf file. Dunno if that would help though.
Tesco would say every little helps so I'll try it, not that they're much of a role model!
Dunno how much help I'm actually being! Don't really know what else to suggest - sorry! :-(
This is helping, believe me.
Mark