check_ntp_peer unreliable on macs

[Peter Doherty]

On Mar 13, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Keith Erekson wrote:

> I found this in my mailing list archives, while looking for  
> information about check_ntp_peer. As far as I can tell, nobody ever  
> answered you...
>
> I was just looking into this exact problem. If you check the verbose  
> output, you will probably see something like this:
>
> 0 candiate peers available
> warning: no synchronization source found
> warning: LI_ALARM bit is set
>
> I do get valid output from "ntpq -p hostname", however.
>
> Apparently, the problems with OS X's NTP are well-known and  
> documented. For example,
>
> http://knol.google.com/k/dirk-h-schulz/time-synchronization-ntp-on-mac-os-x/2bcee0ik2900p/18#
> http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/KnownOsIssues#Section_9.2.5
>
> As a way around this, I thought I would just use check_ntp_time, to  
> compare the xserve's clock against that of the nagios box. However,  
> no luck there either:
>
> sending request to peer 0
> response from peer 0: offset -0.9300264975
> sending request to peer 0
> response from peer 0: offset -0.9299369976
> sending request to peer 0
> response from peer 0: offset -0.9299154976
> sending request to peer 0
> response from peer 0: offset -0.9298709977
> discarding peer 0: stratum=0
> overall average offset: 0
> NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown|
>
>
> It seems that OS X is responding as a stratum 0 server, which is a  
> no-no.
>
> Also, while fiddling with check_ntp_peer, I noticed that it doesn't  
> seem to accept a port (-p or --port), as the help output suggests it  
> should be able to. Am I crazy?
>
> -Keith


Yeah, after a little more diagnostic work I eventually concluded that  
it was just OS X's implementation of NTP that is just broke.  It seems  
to be in sync for a while, then it just forgets it for a while, and  
eventually, maybe it'll sync up again.

Maybe they'll fix that for 10.6 this year.

--Peter


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