NTP issue Continued

[Stephen Carville]

Andrew.Bridgeman at corusgroup.com wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> I am still having problems getting 40 redhat machines to use ntp and
> synchronise with our Windows 2003 Cluster. I have tried a couple of things
> suggested by people but have had no luck in fixing the issue. It seems
> that
> when I put either the IP of the cluster, the name of the cluster or the
> fully qualified name of the cluster in the config files the ntp service
> communicates with the Windows cluster straight away and all the machines
> are synchronised OK. The problem comes when i leave them afterwards for an
> hour or a day or even a week and look back at the time on the machines and
> they are all different.
> 
> I read on the net that the communication used with ntp is UDP over port
> 123
> and was wondering if i have  some kind of polling issue after the initial
> start-up of ntp. Does anyone know more detail on how the ntp part works.
> i.e How often does is poll the cluster server for the time or is there a
> way of checking the communication on that port is working.
> 
> Any  help on this would be much appreciated.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Andrew Bridgeman
> 
> **********************************************************************
> This transmission is confidential and must not be used or disclosed by
> anyone other than the intended recipient. Neither Corus Group Limited nor
> any of its subsidiaries can accept any responsibility for any use or
> misuse of the transmission by anyone.
> 
> For address and company registration details of certain entities
> within the Corus group of companies, please visit
> http://www.corusgroup.com/entities
> 
> **********************************************************************

I just tuned into this thread so sorry if anyone has already suggested this:

Windows 2003 does not include NTP by default but rather Microsoft's 
stripped down implementation of SNTP whic doesn't always play nice with 
others

If your 2003 server is not a DC you may need to set 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpServer\Enabled
to 1.

Setting the "Always a reliable time server" (I think) group policy will 
sometimes help Windows 2003 trick UNIX systems into synchronizing with it.

Here is Technet article that might help

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/b43a025f-cce2-4c82-b3ea-3b95d482db3a1033.mspx

The best solution IMO is to pick a couple of your Linux boxes and set 
them up to be time servers for the rest of the network.  :-)

-- 
Stephen Carville <stephen at totalflood.com>
Systems Engineer
Land America
1.626.667.1450 X1326