[OpenIndiana-discuss] NTPD and PPM issues?

[Dan Swartzendruber]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark [mailto:mark0x01 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2011 5:31 AM
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] NTPD and PPM issues?

On 28/05/2011 7:32 a.m., Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> Andrew Gabriel wrote:
>>
>> It may be the only one which _notices_ it's having this issue.
>> Like it may be the only one which notices if a disk returns a
>> corrupted block.
>> You didn't say what the other OS's are.
>>
> Sorry, I should have provided more information.
>
> VM #1: OpenIndiana. Running ntpd version 4.2.5 - PPM messages seen.
> VM #2: Ubuntu 10.10. Running ntpd version 4.2.4 - no messages seen.
> VM #3: FreeBSD 8.2. Running ntpd version 4.2.4 - no message seen.
>
> Another point: this is on a quad-core 3.2ghz xeon. Very lightly loaded.
>
>
I've experienced serious time sync issues with Windows and linux on ESX 
over the years. Worst was causing AD/kerberos issues, with rapid clock 
skew causing ntp to move out of capture range and head into oblivion.

This is well documented by VMware.

I changed ntp settings for windows to increase to 10x the allowable 
drift, but this cannot be set in OI or linux.

My "fix" there was to turn off ntp, and run a cron job every 15 mins to 
set the clock with ntpdate.

*** A couple of things.  I have in fact read the vmware best practices paper
for time sync in guests.  The fact that I don't see this message on the
other guests (with the same config settings and almost same codebase) makes
me wonder.  Note also:

Monday, May 30, 2011 08:47:25 AM EDT
Mon May 30 08:47:25 EDT 2011
Mon May 30 08:47:25 EDT 2011

The first line is on the OI VM. The second on the ubuntu VM.  The third is
on a physical centos 5.5 server.  All 3 are identical to the second, so
there is clearly no drift issue, so why the messages?  I'm tempted to either
ignore these or turn off ntp and use vmware guest tools time sync.