Re: ntpd losing synchronization

[Donald Spoon <dspoon@astcomm.net>]

Alex Malinovich wrote:
> My firewall machine also functions as my local NTP server and updates
> from the public NTP servers. Recently, however, it's begun to lose
> synchronization quite frequently. From my logcheck report:
>
> May 22 08:03:47 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: time reset -0.173946 s
> May 22 08:03:47 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:19:07 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: time reset 0.200497 s
> May 22 08:19:07 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:28:54 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:34:19 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:35:22 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: time reset -0.326498 s
> May 22 08:35:22 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:48:24 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:50:31 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:56:56 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
> May 22 08:59:12 Bigbrother ntpd[1029]: synchronisation lost
>
> Is this anything to really be concerned about? I've always lost
> synchronization, but it was on the order of 3 - 4 times a day, not 10
> times in 55 minutes. Any suggestions?

I had this happen to be a while back... tore my hair out until I tried 
to "ping" the public server I had been using.  It was down!!  After 
that, I always have a couple of entries there just in case one of them 
goes "bad" for a while.  You might try checking out access to your 
"public" server....  THEY might be having problems...

Kudos on getting ntpd working on your firewall and synching with an 
external source!  I have not been able to do this here :(  I can run 
ntpd on another machine on my LAN and get it to synch externally just 
fine, but NOT on the firewall machine.  I "think" it has something to do 
with it having 2 NICs and ntpd gets confused...dunno for sure.  Do you 
have any "hints" or "tricks" you employed to get your setup working??