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Feature - NTP stratum too high - test shows yellow

list Paul Root
Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:03:04 -0500
Message-Id: <user-b62da9273ac1@xymon.invalid>

Nice. I'll have to try that.

Paul Root    - Senior Engineer
Managed Services Systems - CenturyLink

-----Original Message-----
From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On
Behalf Of John Horne
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 8:52 AM
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: [Xymon] Feature - NTP stratum too high - test shows yellow

Hello,

Using Xymon 4.3.7 the NTP test currently shows a green result if the
NTP
daemon is running, and red if not. However, what we want to know is if
the NTP daemon is running, but not synchronised to any high stratum
clock. When this happens the NTP daemon will return time based on the
servers own local clock (if so configured), and this will usually be a
low stratum value (on RHEL/CentOS this is stratum 10). We don't want
this, and want to be warned if it happens.

Attached is a patch which will allow admins to specify at what stratum
level the 'ntp' test should turn yellow. If the returned stratum value
(from 'ntpdate') is greater than or equal to the given value, then the
'ntp' test will show yellow.  If the stratum is not specified, then the
ntp test uses the default behaviour (that is, no test of the stratum
value).

This does not work if sntp is used. I had a look at this, but it seems
that older versions of sntp did not return the stratum value. New
versions do, but as far as I can gather sntp is not usually supplied
because of licensing problems.


John.

--
John Horne                   Tel: +XX (X)XXXX XXXXXX
Plymouth University, UK      Fax: +XX (X)XXXX XXXXXX
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