[Info-vax] What's NTP doing ???

[JF Mezei]

On 14-02-02 09:33, David Froble wrote:

> 
> Apparently it's talking to the clock every 2-4 seconds ....

Does it have the privileges to change the clock ? (is it OPER  that is
needed ?)

Try to set your clock back 30 seconds or such and see if NTP will fix it
(and how quickly its gets fixed)

I really really dislike undully long logs because it makes spotting
problems next to impossible.



>From man ntp.conf :

 minpoll minpoll
 maxpoll maxpoll
These options specify the minimum and maximum poll intervals for NTP
messages, in seconds to the power of two.  The maximum poll interval
defaults to 10 (1,024s), but can be increased by the maxpoll option to
an upper limit of 17 (36.4 h).

The minimum poll interval defaults to 6 (64 s), but can be decreased by
the minpoll option to a lower limit of 4 (16 s).


Note sure if those are supported by the VMS version of ntpd. I believe
the ntp.conf file is in TCPIP$ETC directory if I remember correctly. As
you are seeing entries every 3 seconds, this may b some other mechanism
in play here.

>From what I have read, the ntp daemon can go into a "learning mode"
which lasts normally about 15 minutes wyere it builds statistics on
clock drift as well as jitter with the data connection to the remote NTP
server and this is written to a file which is used to determine optimum
polling interval.

It is possible that during that learning mode, the ntp deamon does very
frequent polling. Might explain what you see. (assuming the VMS NTP
daemon came from the standard unix ones)