ntp gone wild

[David Hart]

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 09:47:03AM -0400, Luis wrote:
> 
> * Starting NTP server ...    [ ok ]
> $> lsproc ntp
>     PID USER   RSS  COMMAND
> 31204 root    3708  /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -u 114:114

First a question: where did you get that lsproc command?  I couldn't
find it at http://packages.ubuntu.com/.
 
> $> ls -ld /var/lib/ntp/
> 
> drwxr-xr-x 2 ntp ntp 4.0K 2006-05-17 09:42 /var/lib/ntp//
> 
> no .drift file inside (yet. it takes about 20 min or so according to
> the man page).

IIRC ntpd will not sync if the hardware clock drifts by more than
500ppm (parts per million).  Two checks with ntpdate a couple of hours
apart (with ntpd stopped, of course) should show whether it's inside
that range or not.

If your clock is drifting badly I've a bit of a shot in the dark.
I had a laptop a while back running Gentoo and the clock drifted
wildly.  Stopping apm fixed it and, when acpi had developed so that
it supported my laptop, switching to acpi fixed it permenently.

-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>