Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 21:06:18 -0600 From: dkelly@iquest.com (David Kelly) To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: timed, *ntp*, and/or timeslave Message-ID: <v01530502ac34c9f8fcb9@[204.177.193.231]>
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Sorry to butt in on all the installation woes but I'm have a different question. If it matters, my FreeBSD system is running one of the last 2.0.5-ALPHA's. My FreeBSD machine is behind a firewall and does not have free access to the outside world. I would like to use an automatic facility to sync its clock to a standard. Between SGI systems I have always used timed if I didn't have a known good time reference or timeslave to sync others to a known good time reference. The SGI man pages say timeslave takes fewer net and CPU cycles than timed. FreeBSD has timed but not timeslave. FreeBSD has xntpd, ntpdate, *ntp* etc, and SGI does not. The SGI system is timeslave'd to a known good time reference. I see 3 solutions, 1) learn how to configure xntpd, 2) learn something new about timed and make it work, or 3) find timeslave for FreeBSD. 1) Compiling xntpd for the SGI was no problem. Creating an /etc/ntp.conf has become a problem. Would be happy for xntpd to simply answer any NTP requests and not muck with the SGI clock. Timeslave and timed know how to adjtime() correctly for the SGI IRIX kernel and I'd be hesitant to let xntpd perform that task without specific evidence that it knew how to do it right. 2) Launched "timed -M -F localhost" on the SGI and failed to get timed on the FreeBSD system to connect and accept the SGI as master. On the FreeBSD system timed was launched as "timed -F tomcat1" where tomcat1 is the SGI. Using timedc on FreeBSD "timedc> elect tomcat1" completes with no message. "timedc> msite" reports the FreeBSD machine is still its own master. "timedc> msite tomcat1" says tomcat1 is the time master at tomcat1. Arrrgghh. At least both timed's are talking to each other. Same results from timedc on the SGI. Same results if full addresses or numeric addresses are used. Could it be that both are on different nets with a router or two between? Do I have to spell it out with a specific entry in /etc/networks? 3) Browsing SGI's ftp site I found source for timed as shipped with IRIX 4.0.5. Interesting. Looks just like *BSD's, which it is, with a few IRIX'isms. (Good example of adjtime()) Later after trying to find timeslave via archie & other means I looked at the timed source again and found timeslave.c lurking there! Timeslave was NOT in the Makefile which is the only place I bothered to look the first time. At the begining of timeslave.c was a note saying (my words from memory) "contributed to 4.4BSD Lite...". While xntpd has every bell and whistle imaginable, and probably syncs clocks closer together than timeslave, I'd choose timeslave just because it is simpler and smaller and just plain good enough. Has anyone ported timeslave to FreeBSD yet? -- David Kelly N4HHE, n4hhe@amsat.org, dkelly@iquest.com ============================================================= The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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