1748276 Members
4184 Online
108761 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: Need help on NTP

 
Vidhya B
Frequent Advisor

Need help on NTP

Hi,

I have NTP server in linux. I have clients in hp-ux.

I need to reduce the polling interval. How to do it?

Please help me with this.
2 REPLIES 2
Patrick Wallek
Honored Contributor

Re: Need help on NTP

You can't. NTP will automatically adjust the polling interval. As long as the clock is fairly accurate and does not need a lot of adjustment the polling interval will slowly increase.

If all goes well, the polling interval should eventually reach 1024 seconds.
Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor

Re: Need help on NTP

On HP-UX, Patrick's answer is true: the standard version of xntpd included even in HP-UX 11.31 is too old to support configurable polling intervals.

But on Linux, there *is* a way to adjust the minimum and maximum limits of the polling interval.

The "minpoll" and "maxpoll" keywords in the ntp.conf file specify the limits in seconds as a power of two. If those keywords are not used, the default settings are:

minpoll 6
maxpoll 10

This means the minimum is 2^6 = 64 seconds, and the maximum is 2^10 = 1024 seconds.

The smallest possible minimum value is "minpoll 4" for 2^4 = 16 seconds.

This information can be found in the ntp.conf man page, by using the command "man ntp.conf" on your Linux system.


Having said that, I've never been in a situation where changing the NTP polling interval manually would have been beneficial. So pardon me if I'm a bit curious.

Exactly what is the problem you're attempting to solve by reducing the polling interval?

If some of your clients are falling out of sync, what do their NTP statistics (viewable with "ntpq -p") look like?

MK
MK