[Xymon] BUG: ntpdate command used in Xymon takes 2+ seconds each in RHEL 7 (with ntp 4.2.6+)

[Matt Vander Werf]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for this workaround! I implemented the script as you described and
it seems to work great!

It still shows the original command (with the hard-coded parameters) on the
ntp status page (which makes sense), but I can tell that it's working
because the time spent on the "NTP Tests Executed" part of xymonnet went
from taking ~14 seconds to ~0.738 seconds for the 7 hosts I currently have
set up to use the ntp test. (We were keeping the number of hosts that were
using the ntp test at a bare minimum to prevent any issues with xymonnet
going over the 5 minute limit, and this was the bare minimum number of
hosts we could go down to. We had many, many more hosts (over 170, at
least) with ntp checks in our old Xymon server running RHEL 5, before
moving to our current Xymon server running RHEL 7, where we had the issues
with ntpdate).

Of course, I'd prefer this issue be fixed in the actual Xymon code, so I
don't have to use this workaround to make the ntp tests work, but this will
do for the time being....

I do hope this can get resolved somehow in the Xymon code sometime in the
near future!

Thanks again, Jeremy, for this great workaround!

--
Matt Vander Werf
HPC System Administrator
University of Notre Dame
Center for Research Computing - Union Station
506 W. South Street
South Bend, IN 46601
Phone: (574) 631-0692

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 8:50 PM, Jeremy Laidman <jlaidman at rebel-it.com.au>
wrote:

> On 25 September 2015 at 23:07, Matt Vander Werf <mvanderw at nd.edu> wrote:
>
>> <bump>
>>
>> Any response to this e-mail? Just wanted to make sure it wasn't missed....
>>
>
> In the mean time, here's a work-around you could use.
>
> First create a script named /usr/local/bin/xymon-ntpdate:
>
> #!/bin/sh
> while [ "$2" ]; do shift; done
> ntpdate -p 1 -u -q $1
>
> Now, define NTPDATE=/usr/local/bin/xymon-ntpdate
>
> This script simply throws away all of the switches, and only keeps the IP
> address given by xymonnet, adding its own parameters as required.
>
> You could probably squeeze this into NTPDATE definition, something like
> this (untested):
>
> NTPDATE="sh -c 'while [ .$1 != . ]; do shift; done; ntpdate -p 1 -u -q $1'"
>
> I'd go with a separate script.
>
> To be honest, I don't really know why the parameters were hard-coded into
> xymonnet in the first place, and not defined in NTPDATE.  Doing the latter
> would make it much easier to tune for the environment or substitute a
> different command with completely different parameters.
>
> Cheers
> Jeremy
>
>
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