This Space for Rent

The joy of NTP

The motherboard on pell is fairly elderly, and one of the annoying featurettes it's developed in its old age is that it will sometimes lose track of the date when you shut it off. Today, I shut it off so I could move it off the floor and up onto an equipment rack in the world's most underventilated machine room (it's got two hefty air conditioners, but it's also got a 200-node beowolf, a collection of large and powerhungry SGI boxes, a few itanics, and a big honking EMC disk array. And a netapp, but that just works, so it's not important) and the clock reset itself back to 1999.

Guess what ntpd did? Did it jump the clock forward with -g? Hell, no; ntpd looked at all the stratum 1 and 2 clock servers reporting that it was May 2005, looked at the local clock that was reporting that it was sometime in January 1999, and decided to ignore all those pesky nameservers and trust the force.

The force can bite me. NTP did bite me, in the usual cheerful way that ntpd fails when it just doesn't understand the world. And thus when I posted an article to TSFR, it backdated it to 1999, which completely confused annotations, and then completely confused me.

Acall to ntpdate fixed that problem, but in a fairly slow and painful manner. Did I mention that ntpd sucks? Why, yes, and it can bite me too.

This has been a public service announcement from the department of All Hardware Sucks; All Software Sucks.

Comments


Sevral times I day, when I'm actually trying to do something with or to any of the computers in my world, I say, with various levels of pique, "I hate computers."

Then I solve the issue and my ego gets a big boost.

It is definitely a love/hate relationship. :)

Lynn Dobbs Sun May 29 08:34:12 2005

Comments are closed