[hobbit] ntpdate deprecated

[Peter Welter]

Hi Buchan,

Thanks for the response. I will disable the ntp-test. it's running on three
hosts and all of them report the same WARNING-output.

However, the reason I came up with this is that in our network we have some
W2K-hosts (the Domain Controllers) who have (according to Xymon) a time that
is not accurate (I'm using the CLOCK option and Xymon thinks they are
drifting too far; above threshold of 30 seconds).

I wondered: how is this determined on the Windows side? Because when we have
a look at this system, the time is correct? It looks like the time
difference between the page generation and the send time (12:38:57 -
12:37:19) = 98 seconds off (see below).

The time on the server however IS correct. I've seen it, but since the total
MSG-size for these servers is so large (a few hundreds KB to 1 or 2 MB,
because of the domain controller function, there are hundreds of open ports
- netstat output), it does take some addiotinal time for the Xymon
client/server combination, to proces?!

Can I limit this output. For example: do NOT send UDP output? That would be
a quick fix solution?
Or better: split the output in several files, since the other (netstat) info
is valuable, but it should NOT interfere with the normal functionality of
Xymon and/of its clients. So the output should be send seperately to the
server.

Regards, Peter

*Wed Nov 11 12:38:57 2009*
------------------------------





    Wed Nov 11 12:37:19 2009 NOT ok

[image: yellow] System clock is 98 seconds off (max 30)

local: Wed Nov 11 12:37:19 2009
UTC: Wed Nov 11 11:37:19 2009




2009/11/11 Buchan Milne <bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net>

> 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
>
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