[gentoo-user] Fine Tuning NTP Server

[Nick Khamis]

Hello Everyone,

A while back I was inquiring about the best way to have computers on
the network synched. Long story short, we opted to go with an NTP
server installed on one machine, and synching the rest of the machines
against it.

However, I am not sure if the NTP server is properly synched with the
public stratum 2 server furthermore, it does not seem like the clients
are synced with the base server:

ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
========================================================
*tick.nrc.com   .GPS.            1 u  52h  36h    2   56.036    8.131   0.445
 tock.nrc.com   .INIT.          16 u    -  36h    0    0.000    0.000   0.000
 192.168.2.255   .BCST.          16 u    - 1024    0    0.000    0.000   0.000


And one of the clients:

 ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
========================================================
 time.server 128.233.154.245  2 u   32   64  377    0.168  25539.9  40.427

I have to be honest, not sure what those fields mean, but when I manually check
the machines using the date command, i see that clients are ~20 sec behind.

Was wondering how to best manipulate sync given our reliance on an outside ntp
server. We are not looking for nanosecond synching, but at least down
to the second
would be efficient.

Finally, is "refid 128.233.154.245" on client's pointing to the
outside stratum server normal
behaviour? Shoild "refid" not be pointing to our NTP server?


Your help is greatly appreciated,

Nick.