NTP issues RHEL5
 

We have 3 sites and we are experiencing some strange problems in one of th sites. We use NTP to keep the servers in time and this works fine for 2 of the sites but in one of the site we get these errors in the log

ntpd[30062]: synchronized to server, stratum 3
ntpd[30062]: no servers reachable
ntpd[30062]: synchronized to server, stratum 3
ntpd[30062]: time reset +2.119167 s
ntpd[30062]: synchronized to server, stratum 3

For some reason the server seems to drop back between 2 and 3 seconds behind the other servers for no apparent reason. This happens even if NTP is turned off. Both the other sites work without any problem. We have run a packet capture at a working site and at the site with the problems and we dont see any differences other than the server becoming unsychronized. We have checked the firewall and that is not blocking access and the local firewall is disabled. All our sites are connected via a dedicated link and I have tried connecting to servers in the other sites and the problem persists. It looks like something local keeps changing the time but I can figure out what.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

strange, can you show us an ntpq -pn from this and a working server?

this isn't a virtual machine is it?

Non Working
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
*serverIP externalNTP 3 u 24 64 377 0.226 2232.55 6.468

Working
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
*serverIP externalNTP 3 u 12 1024 377 1.363 6.149 10.201
serverIP externalNTP 4 u 558 1024 377 0.283 -14.395 6.638

It is not a virtual machine.

thanks

Adam

well it certainly looks happy there, and presumably they are syncing to the very same server there..?

They are syncing to different servers. If you look at the offset it is 2 seconds on the incorrect server. It may say it is synched now but every few minutes is loses the synch.