OpenNTPd
OpenNTPd is a portable implementation of the Network Time Protocol. It provides the ability to sync the local clock to remote NTP servers and can act as an NTP server itself, redistributing the local clock.
| Tags | Networking |
|---|---|
| Licenses | BSD Original |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
Recent releases
- 17 May 2006 07:54
Changes: This corresponds to the OpenBSD 3.9 release. Support for "listen on *" has been added for several platforms. Installation documentation has been improved. Man pages are now generated in the correct format for each platform. Various small problems have been fixed.
- 05 Jun 2005 04:12
Changes: Handling of network error conditions has been improved: some conditions that caused excessive CPU use on Linux or the server to shut down are now handled correctly. Logging has be made quieter and small adjustments will only be logged in debug mode. Query intervals are now randomized, servers with larger offsets or error conditions will be queried less frequently. Support for IRIX and QNX4 has been added.
- 05 Jun 2005 04:12
Changes: Handling of network error conditions has been improved: some conditions that caused excessive CPU use on Linux or the server to shut down are now handled correctly. Logging has be made quieter and small adjustments will only be logged in debug mode. Query intervals are now randomized, servers with larger offsets or error conditions will be queried less frequently. Support for IRIX, QNX4, and AIX platforms has been added. The builtin randomization code will be automatically used if OpenSSL is not available.
- 10 Dec 2004 21:53
Changes: A new "-s" option was added to step the clock on startup rather than slewing. The stratum, precision, and refid are now set correctly in replies (the latter means ntptrace will now work). The program is more robust and less noisy in the case of some network error conditions. The IP ToS low-delay bit is now set on IPv4 packets. HP-UX and Solaris < 7 are now supported platforms. There were also other minor bugfixes and improvements.
- 03 Nov 2004 08:03
Changes: Recent changes from OpenBSD were imported. The new "-s" option was added to step the clock on startup rather than slewing it. The stratum and refid are now set correctly in replies (the latter means ntptrace will now work). The program is more robust and less noisy in the case of some network error conditions. The IP ToS low-delay bit is set on IPv4 packets.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: Openntpd Server mode
> I set 'listen on $external_ip' in
> ntpd.conf. It binds to port 123 (netstat
> -lnp & lsof) but it does not reply
> to requests sent by other servers, even
> 'nmap -sU -p 123' fails.
>
> (and ntpd --help segfaults on solaris
> ;-) )
Some servers (eg the reference implementation) won't sync to a server that doesn't set the precision field, which openntpd didn't. I don't know why nmap doesn't work, though.
The segfault was my fault, I didn't initialize __progname in the compat library for platforms that don't have a real __progname.
Both of those have been fixed in the snapshots (http://www.zip.com.au/~dtucker/openntpd/snapshot/)
and will be fixed in the next release.
Openntpd Server mode
I really hate the ntp.org reference implementation..
I was glad to see openntpd, but i looks like i'm to stupid to configure the ntpd:
I set 'listen on $external_ip' in ntpd.conf. It binds to port 123 (netstat -lnp & lsof) but it does not reply to requests sent by other servers, even 'nmap -sU -p 123' fails.
(and ntpd --help segfaults on solaris ;-) )
Hmm?
Re: This is not an NTP daemon
> Turns out Brad Knowles has a few things
> to say about openntpd.
Some of the issues raised by Brad have been resolved in the development tree a while ago and are now resolved in 3.6.1p1. Some of the other comments are arguable or misleading.
I have posted a (long) response (http://advogato.org/person/dtucker/diary.html?start=52) to most of the issues raised.
This is not an NTP daemon
I would like to issue a warning here: It seems like this is does not conform to the full NTP protocol at all and it nothing but a simple SNTP daemon, of which there are many. It is false marketing and the documentation conveniently skips mentioning it. I feel let down by the otherwise so skillful programmers behind this.
After spending a lot of time trying to install and understand this software I suspected this and search the web for references. Turns out Brad Knowles has a few things (http://bradknowles.typepad.com/considered_harmful/2004/09/openntpd.html) to say about openntpd.
Be warned that if you use SNTP instead of NTP and the server clock breaks down, all your time will be compromised.