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August 18, 2007
Wonders of NTP (revisited)
As I described in a previous entry, NTP is a quite useful tool to address drifting PC hardware clock. So, during the past few weeks I noticed that my workstation clock was roughly 6min slower than expected. I immediately checked my setclock script and realized that two of the public pool servers had gone off line. Simple fix, right.. Well not exactly, it seems that many of the chrono servers do not communicate on the UDP port.
I spent the next 20 minutes searching NTP.org for servers which accepted UDP packets. UDP is not the most reliable means of transferring packets, so it makes sense that folks would avoid it. Hence most of the primary or StratumOne servers did not accept respond to UDP requests.
Nonetheless, I am a creature of habit and didn't really want to revise my script. While conducting my search I found several inactive servers too. Luckily they offer a means to report unresponsive chrono servers. I ran nslookup against the desired server and then pinged the IP address.
Once I was convinced the server was alive, I then added the desired chrono server to my script. Now I'll have to make sure my cronjob is running and I'm done.
Posted by AG at August 18, 2007 7:56 AM