[hobbit] ntp check expansion thoughts

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

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

>>> gendalia at iastate.edu 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

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk