NTP Frustrations
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Hi!
Would be nice to know: WHICH board? ;-)
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Sure it was the board, and not just that the time was so off that ntp had not correct it yet. The screen shot OP showed showed a large offset and reaches were not even 377 yet. So its like they had just started ntpd. Prob do a ntpdate first before restarting ntpd to get the time close so that ntpd has easier time of starting.
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Sorry, I had restarted NTP just before posting. Needless to say, it was off for days.. Since replacing the board it has been perfect.
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Depending ntpd will not fix it if too far out. Pretty sure the default max offset is like 1000 seconds.
You can use the -g to have it set the time no matter what I believe. I have not looked to deep into all the new features of ntp on pfsense since while I have it sync its time to my ntp server, it is not a ntp server for my network.
As other have stated I have never seen a clock fail in such a way to even with ntp running have it loose so much time, etc.. But sure if the clock is so bad that even with ntp running it can keep decent time at some point its offset could exceed what ntp will fix, etc.
Seems your all good now, but setting the time via ntpdate before starting ntpd would of been something I would of done when seeing such a large offset. And then keeping an eye on how it was drifting. You could of enabled the Graphs which are new in 2.2 for example and kept an eye on it - see attached.
My pfsense is a VM so you can not expect its time to be dead nuts on, etc.
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If you want to have an ugly NTP graphs competition, mine is worse - haha.
But yeah - not soooooooooo far off.
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setting the time via ntpdate before starting ntpd would of been something I would of done when seeing such a large offset.
That's already how it is normally done, at least during boot and restarting services on a WAN change. Take a look at /usr/local/sbin/ntpdate_sync_once.sh for details. You should get a log notice for both sync failure and sync success before the ntpd daemon is run.
Not sure how ntp is restarted via the status_services page or services widget.
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I thought there was a ntpdate done before - but what if that fails? And time is way off?
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Hmm, it looks like I have always had the graph on. Attached is the graph from my machine for the last week.
I am by no means an NTP expert and really don't know what any of this means.
You can see where Wednesday night I changed the board and the graph looks different. (That was the only thing I changed.)
For some reason there are a lot of blank spots, I don't know why because the machine is always on.
Ryan
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I would think the blank spots are when the ntpd was offline, or was so far out of wack that was out of sync. What does the ntpd log show for these times?
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NTP can crash and without a watchdog service restarting it, it would probably stay down until reboot
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I thought there was a ntpdate done before - but what if that fails? And time is way off?
If sync'ing fails, a message is logged but pfSense still tries to start the ntp daemon. If the time is off by more than 1000 seconds at that point, ntpd should promptly exit with a message saying so, and should remove its pid file (not sure it always does). pfSense carries on, assuming that ntpd is running, AFAIK.
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My NTP gets a watchdog restart pretty regularly.
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Blank spots are negative values being clipped off. More here: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=76620.msg482370#msg482370
