Implementing a HP-UX Time Server

[Andres_13]

Hi gurus,

I´m looking for some information about to implement a HP-UX 11.0 time server in order to sinchronize all of my HP-UX 11.23 boxes. Also i really want to know what happens when the time server is down. For security reasons it is no possible to connect such server to internet.

Many thanks in advance!

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

To implment.

Get a radio based clock that is compatable with your central HP-UX time server. They have become less expensive. It will get its time from a satellite, avoiding the Internet.

The central box acts as a time server, the rest of the 11.23 boxes connect vi ntp.conf to this system.

I would recommend using a system under support, perhaps 11.11 as the central time server, just in case you have issues and need to talk to the response center. I see no issues though using a system with no OS support as you plan.

When the time server is down the systems that were getting time from the central time server use their system clocks to calculate time going forward during the outage. They don't revert to whatever their system clocks say, they just keep running and gradually being less accurate until the central time server comes back on line.

SEP

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

SEP is right re 11.00. It's worth to use a supported OS version.
In order not to be highly dependent on the time server you can define all other computers as peers. This configuration causes all machines to sychronize with all this commumity and to minimize drift when the server is down.
BTW, the idea with radioclock is good as well.

HTH

[Andres_13]

Thanks Steve / Victor.

Let me study our current possibilities and i'll be back soon. By the way we can bypass the radio based clock? i just want to assure that all my boxes have the same timestamp no matter if it is taken from a time server, radio based clock os something.

The main idea would be use one box and based on it self time/date all others take its timestamp.

I hope not confuse you. Regards.

[Bill Hassell]

As long as you don't care about the exact time, using the 11.00 box as a server will keep all the other boxes in sync. NOTE: large scale Unix boxes are notoriously lousy clocks so expect your time to drift several seconds to several minutes over each week. Now all the boxes will appear to drift the same way as the NTP server, so as long as these boxes don't communicate with other systems, the drift is probably not important -- for now.

Note that NTP is very robust. The server can be down for days and once it comes back up, all the clients will slowly resync.

Now if these boxes are connected to a corporate network, then almost all quality routers and firewalls have NTP service available so you can use your internal NTP service rather than patch together your own service.

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi andres,

You can configure this 11.0 server to be a Local Clock Impersonator.


If you are behind a firewall, not connected to the internet, and cannot justify the expense of a radio receiver, you can still have a time server. You can declare your NTP machine as a time server. This machine can serve time within a closed domain. This is the least recommended option. Because the server is isolated, it has no way to synchronize to the real time. Beware, using this option will cause problems if you ever connect outside of your domain.

To set up the local clock impersonator, add the following line to the /etc/ntp.conf file:

server 127.127.1.1 minpoll 3 maxpoll 4



for more info see:
http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90685/ch07s01.html#chbdhfdd

hope this helps too!

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Andres_13]

Thanks to all.

Ok guys, let me deploy it and of course if i have any issue... i'll be back.

Please await. Regards.

[Andres_13]

I have some questions to you:

In the server side which files are needed? and what fields are recomended to edit?

In the client side what files are needed?

All of this assuming that i want to use and isolated server.

Regards!

[Fabian Briseño]

Hello Andres.

check out this link.

http://www.ntp.org/

It's the official ntp page, here you should find what you are looking for.


Buena suerte amigo.

[Andres_13]

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