On Wednesday, 11 November 2009 12:00:19 Peter Welter wrote:
Today, I discovered the following for the ntp-test on our Xymon server:
Service ntp on xymon is OK (up)
Command: ntpdate -u -q -p 2 132.229.84.242 2>&1
!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WARNING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!The ntpdate program is deprecated and should not be used any more. To
quote the upstream ntp developers:
"The functionality ntpdate offered is now provided by the ntpd daemon itself. If you call ntpd with the command line option -q it will retrieve the current time and set it accordingly."
Please check the Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon man page and http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/DeprecatingNtpdate for further information.
You can replace the ntpdate call with "rcntp ntptimeset" to achieve an inital poll of the servers specified in /etc/ntp.conf.
The program /usr/sbin/sntp offers comparable functionality to ntpdate.
Except the option flags are totally different.
Specifically sntp -P no -r pool.ntp.org is equivalent to ntpdate pool.ntp.org
For further details please refer to the man page of sntp.
sntp: unable to write PID to /etc/sntp.pid sntp: Permission denied
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/DeprecatingNtpdate#Set_the_time_before_ running_ntpd
I always thought I needed to run this ntp-test to make sure the time is correct on the central monitor server, to make sure that the time on other monitored hosts is checked correctly.
Should I
- change the NTPDATE="ntpdate"-location in /etc/hobbit/hobbitserver.cfg to NTPDATE="sntp -u" to make it work again?
This on it's own won't be enough, as additional options are added to the NTPDATE path:
$ grep -n -A7 NTPDATE ./bbnet/bbtest-net.c 991: p = xgetenv("NTPDATE"); 992- strcpy(cmdpath, (p ? p : "ntpdate")); 993- for (t=service->items; (t); t = t->next) { 994- if (!t->host->dnserror) { 995- sprintf(cmd, "%s -u -q -p 2 %s 2>&1", cmdpath, ip_to_test(t->host)); 996- t->open = (run_command(cmd, "no server suitable for synchronization", t->banner, 1, extcmdtimeout) == 0); 997- } 998- }
These options aren't supported by sntp. You could hack this by modifying the options, but the long-term fix (for people who don't have sntp yet) would have to be different.
- disable the ntp-test since because it is useless for checking the correct time on monitored hosts.
NTP is not that useful for monitoring the time on monitored hosts, (the client's built-in check is better, see the CLOCK option for hobbit-clients.cfg thresholds), unless you are running all your hosts as ntp servers. It is however useful for checking whether the host believes it should be able to provide time services to other hosts.
I only run this network test against NTP servers that other hosts use as time sources.
Regards, Buchan