Re: Clock running slow

["Donald R. Spoon" <dspoon@astcomm.net>]

Bill Moseley wrote:
> I setup a machine for a friend and every few days I ssh in to see how
> things look.  Twice now I have found the date about twenty minutes behind.
> The first time I found this I ran ntpdate, made sure the hwclock was
> updated, restarted ntp-simple and thought the problem was fixed.  I just
> checked again and it's twenty minutes slow again.  The machine has not been
> restarted for ten days.
>
> This is on an old Dell PIII machine.
>
> What steps should I follow to reset the clock (and hwclock)?  Do I need to
> remove or reset a drift file?  What could cause the clock to get that far
> behind while ntpd is running?
>
> I can see that ntp is running from ps, and I see the drift file being
> written to (just a few minutes ago):
>
> $ ls -l /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
> -rw-r--r--    1 root     root            7 Dec  4 20:08 /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
>
> although /var/log/ntpstats/loopstats is old (maybe that's run once a day?)
>
> -rw-r--r--    2 root     root         1423 Dec  3 01:03 loopstats
>
> Thanks,

Sounds like NTPDATE is working OK, but NTP isn't...right?

Based on some past experience here, I would recommend looking at any 
firewall rules to see if port 123 is blocked!  I had this problem, and 
discovered that NTPDATE would update just fine with it blocked, but NTP 
just wouldn't sync.  If it is blocked, open it (port 123), stop NTP and 
re-run NTPDATE to get the HW clock in synch, then re-start NTP and see 
if it goes away.  I always made things worse by messing around with the 
drift file....

My loopstats file seems to be updated about every 6 hours here....

Cheers,
-Don Spoon-