Steve Fosdick wrote:

Do you have something like this in the ntp.conf on each machine?

# ... and use the local system clock as a reference if all else fails server 127.127.1.0 fudge 127.127.1.0 stratum 10

If so I am guessing that the secondary PC is refusing to sync to a server that appears to be in the same stratum as itself, i.e. 10. You could change the PC you want to use as the master to stratum 9 and see if that solves it.

Thanks for your clues, Steve.

I do have those lines in /etc/ntp.conf. I tried using ntpq to look at the debugging info (as per the HTML docs) and it seemed to be saying that the the reason for failure was due to the main PC being too high a stratum at stratum=15, despite those lines in the config file.

Also the 'flash' variable was reading 20, which, when decoded using another of the docs, merely said "wind the clock up"....!!

Is this going to be another CUPS horror-story?

Cheers,

Gerald.