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ntp check expansion thoughts

list Paul Williamson
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:32:30 -0500
Message-Id: <user-0ada57f62759@xymon.invalid>

Craig Cook's ntp check on deadcat has an option to check 
all hosts.  I do this from one of my BBNET (not running 
Hobbit, so I don't know if it will work for you) servers, checking 
all 8 of our time servers from one BBNET server.  Of course, 
this is from the reference point of the BBNET server, but 
it would be a start to where you want to go.

Paul
user-4d3c8321d54f@xymon.invalid 01/24/06 11:15 AM >>>
We're a kerberos based shop, which means everything authenticating 
to kerberos needs to be within 5 minutes of our kerberos server's
clock.  We recently had problems with a few important servers having
severe time keeping problems, as well as two of our time servers not
keeping sync because of multiprocessor issues.  For a lot of our
servers it'd be nice to warn if time is more than a minute or two
out from our reference clock on the kerberos servers, and go red at
four or five minutes out.  But it'd also be nice to have a warning
if our central time servers are having problems keeping sync, or
having other problems (I'm not intimately familiar with ntp, so I'm
not sure what problems those could be).

I think the ntp check right now only checks that ntp is running.
It would be nice to check that there's a valid sys.peer, and maybe
some number of acceptable candidates, maybe that the offset and
jitter are within some reasonable parameters for the peers/servers.

I'm mostly just thinking about implementing something like this
at the moment, maybe someone already has this, or maybe there's
a better way to think about this, so I'd appreciate input on it.

Tracy J. Di Marco White
Information Technology Services
Iowa State University