Re: ntpd and crond question

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 20 May 2013, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:

> I have NetBSD 5.1 running on a colocated virtual machine running on a
> remote (to me) site.   I am having no success is getting the system
> clock to synchronise using ntpd, whereas all my various other systems
> are in lock step.   And, at least when the system is idling, crond is
> reported as taking about 50% of available CPU time.
>
> The drift in the system clock is very substantial: could this be
> because if I use m other systems as peers or servers the distance
> (U.K. to California) is excessive?   Perhaps someone could
> suggest/offer sites in the S.F. Bay Area to which I could
> synchronkise?

Google of Bay area and NTP shows some.  Try using 
http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/us ?

> I don't understand the crond behaviour - there is little in the
> crontabs, there's no queue of jobs wiating to be processed - and
> nothing I can seen in the results of a web search that seems to relate
> to my situation.

Please confirm that crond (notice the "d") is the process using the cpu. 
(If it is, you may have some unknown program running.)

> Can anyone suggest a line of attack?

If it is called "crond" maybe ktrace and tcpdump to see what that bogus 
program is doing.