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ntp check expansion thoughts

4 messages in this thread

list Tracy di Marco White · Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:15:46 CST ·
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
list Larry Barber · Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:22:11 -0600 ·
There's an ntp script available on deadcat that I believe does what you
require (warning, html coming up):


     Tue Jan 24 10:19:52 CST 2006 Clock is synchronized


Clock offset
(ms)Jitter
(ms)Clock drift
(ppm)Residual drift
(ppm)Stratum[image: green] 0.4850.126[image: green] -130.957[image:
green] 0.002[image: green] 2


ServerRefidStratumReachDelay
(ms)Jitter
(ms)Offset
(ms)Dispersion
(ms)Status165.221.90.22CDMA[image: green] 13770.8920.094[image: green]
0.48514.847[image: green] sel_sys.peerLOCAL(0)LOCAL(0)[image: green]
103770.0000.008[image: green] 0.0000.948[image: clear] unknown

NTP version: ntpd 4.1.2 at 1.892
bb-ntp.sh Version:0.9.2


Thanks,
Larry Barber
quoted from Tracy di Marco White


On 1/24/06, Tracy Di Marco White <user-4d3c8321d54f@xymon.invalid> wrote:

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

list Richard Deal · Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:24:24 -0500 ·
I use server-time-ntp.0.9.2.3.tar.gz from deadcat to do just that.
quoted from Larry Barber

-----Original Message-----
From: user-4d3c8321d54f@xymon.invalid [mailto:user-4d3c8321d54f@xymon.invalid]
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 11:16 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: [hobbit] ntp check expansion thoughts


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

list Paul Williamson · Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:32:30 -0500 ·
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 >>>
quoted from Richard Deal
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