Running chrony and rtc
A few questions about running chrony.
1) How do I debug chrony? How do I see what it's doing (or not doing)?
When it first installed it seemed like it was doing nothing. All that
was logged was:
Apr 21 10:15:36 spot chronyd[619]: chronyd version V1_14 starting
Apr 21 10:15:36 spot chronyd[619]: Linux kernel major=2 minor=4 patch=20
Apr 21 10:15:36 spot chronyd[619]: MD5 took 2 useconds
After messing with it for a while and adding a few servers it finally
said:
Apr 21 10:52:09 spot chronyd[716]: Selected source 140.221.9.20
Still it would be nice to see how it's trying to connect -- you know,
verbose logging. For example, I entered my ISP's DNS servers -- how do I
know if they are failing or not?
2) With NTP in the past I've always listed multiple servers. I thought
the idea was to sync with a few servers to figure out network delays and
such. Should I list multiple servers with chrony?
3) I'm confused about syncing the hardware clock with the real time. I'd
like to have the hardware clock updated, too. On other machines I've got
ntp and ntpdate installed.
IIRC, I used to use ntpdate with ntp. I'm not clear if that's correct
or not, though. I guess I used ntpdate to refresh the time to the current
time on boot to avoid a long slew time by ntp.
So I'm not clear what chrony provides for updating the hardware clock.
I do have this in my kernel:
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
CONFIG_RTC=y
and in chrony.conf I have:
rtcfile /var/lib/chrony/chrony.rtc
rtconutc
If I read the docs correctly, /var/lib/chrony/chrony.rtc is written at
shutdown to say how far off the hardware clock is and that is used at
startup next time to determine how to set the system time (based on how
long the power was off, and the rate of time gain/loss.
Still, it would be nice to keep my hardware clock close to real time. Is
there a way to do that within chrony? Or do I need to use hwclock command
(in cron, for example).
Thanks,
--
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org
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