Installing and Administering Internet Services

314 Chapter7

Conﬁguring the Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Troubleshooting ntp

the node bad:

If the local node cannot form an association with its higher-level server

or its peer, log in to the higher-level server or peer and issue the

command:

/usr/sbin/ntpq -p

Verify that the higher-level server/peer has itself established an

association with a time source.

Query with Debug Option

If you cannot form an association with a server or peer, stop the local

xntpd and send a time request to the server/peer with the ntpdate

command and the debug (-d) option:

/sbin/init.d/xntpd stop

/usr/sbin/ntpdate -d

server

The debug (-d) option prints information about the requests sent to the

remote xntpd and the information returned by the remote xntpd. Note

that ntpdate will fail if xntpd is already running on the local system.

Note also that ntpdate does not use authentication, so it should only be

executable by root.

You can also use ntpdate on systems where exact time synchronization

is not necessary. You could run ntpdate periodically from cron every

hour or two to synchronize the local clock to another system’s clock. Refer

to the ntpdate(1M) man page for more information.

Error Messages

This section describes a few error messages you may encounter when

working with NTP.

Table 7-8 ntpg Output Showing NTP Associations

remote refid st when poll reach delay offset disp

===========================================================================

*good.cup.hp LOCAL(1) 2 29 64 377 5.43 -0.16 16.40

bad 0.0.0.0 - 31 64 0