NTPDATE AND TIME ZONES

[Carlo Henrico_1]

I have a customer whose timezone specifications do not conform to any "known" one (none in the tztab at any rate).

As a result, using the Namibian legislative guides regarding timezone in Namibia, I set up a new one on tztab and have got it working. But guess what, L1000's and their little crystals do not like the heat so the server gains time - answer - ntp!!!

Not so easy though, as long as I use a known timezone, ntp works, but as soon as I change it to my newly created timezone for Namibia I get the following:

26 Aug 15:31:17 ntpdate[23951]: no server suitable for synchronization found.

Any ideas please?

Carlo

[John Bolene]

timezones are only used to display the local info

ntp gets utc numbers from the server so anything in the timezone should not have any affect on that

have you tried xntpd? easy to configure thru sam

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Start by querying your ntp servers (note: multiple--don't use just one) with ntpq -p NTP_ServerName. If the name cannot be located or it does not respond to the ntpq request, then it will not provide ntp services. This is not dependent on tztab or TZ or even the kernel's timezone parameter.

The message about no server suitable is displayed when the system first boots up and follows the instructions in /sbin/init.d/xntpd. This script will use an environment variable NTPDATE_SERVER and if this value does not point to a valid server, you'll get the error message. Note that this value is separate from the servers listed in /etc/ntp.conf, although I would definitely recommend making the NTPDATE_SERVER value the same as the preferered server listed in ntp.conf.

Make sure your machine is actually synced by using:

ntpq -p

The 'reach' value should be 377 although after rebooting, this value may be lower for a while. 377 means that the source is reasonable dependable to sync the local machine.

As mentioned, changing TZ to some other value is not meaningful to the kernel or to ntp as HP-UX keeps time based on the UTC (also known as Zulu time or Greenwich Mean Time). You see the date decoded from UTC by use of the TZ variable and the tztab file. But this only occurs at the user and program level.