Re: sntpclock warnings and seldom failures on Gentoo Linux

Yassen Damyanov wrote:
> Anyone to have slightest idea what might be the cause of this bug:
> 
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112710
> 
> clockspeed has no Gentoo maintainer recently, that's why I am
> bothering the clockspeed list.

The messages you're seeing:

  sntpclock: warning: unable to read clock: bad response format
  sntpclock: fatal: time uncertainty too large

have more to do with your network and your choice of NTP server than
with the sntpclock software itself. The Network Time Protocol uses UDP,
a connectionless data transfer method with no built-in system of
congestion control. What this means is that sometimes UDP packets get to
their intended destination and sometimes they don't. Under very heavy
traffic, sntpclock won't he able to communicate with the NTP server in a
timely manner and thus won't have enough information to adjust the
system clock correctly. It will warn you and if things don't improve,
eventually die. Every time I've seen these messages, it's been because
of high traffic or a dodgy NTP server.


Toby