Subject: Re: clock accuracy
To: Armen Babikyan <armenb@moof.ai.mit.edu>
From: David Leonard <leonard@csee.uq.edu.au>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 03/10/1999 10:16:39
i recall finding a manual page describing the -g flag.. it seems to cause
the clock to be synced regardless of drift on this mac...  (xntpd 3-5.93)

24406 ??  S<s    56:27.14 /usr/local/sbin/ntpd -g (xntpd)

d

On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Armen Babikyan wrote:
> >the NTP server is about 3 sec in maximum. But when I switch to NetBSD, the
> >accuracy goes down. The time differenece from an NTP server is about 20
> 
> ntp has this preset "drift" variable in its code. By default, this value is
> set it 500, meaning that if the OS drifts less than 500 units by the next
> time it looks to update the time, it'll reupdate it.  If the drift ever
> gets higher than 500, ntp doesn't update the time anymore. This is why
> xntpd doesn't work reliably in NetBSD (all of a sudden, it just stops
> fixing the clock). Maybe the people who wrote xntpd decided that if the
> drift was higher than 500, there was something wrong somewhere and it
> should leave the time as it is. On mac68k, its a known hardware problem.
> 
> the units are probably some fraction of a second amount of drift per second
> of real time (and in which direction, + or -).
> 
> I got the sources to ntpd and replaced the MAXFREQ value with 5000,
> originally, and that kept updating the time for quite some time.  However,
> this became an upper limit too, so I recompiled ntpd to have a drift factor
> of 50000, which seems to work fine for now.  My clock gets updated properly.
> 
> My IIvx (33Mhz 68030) is fairly loaded at times - running an IRC server,
> webserver, and an appletalk network tunnel server. (the last takes up lots
> of cpu and network) - perhaps that's why my drift limit is 50000.  People
> on less active computers could probably tone down that amount.
> 
> I don't know if this is a really kosher way of updating the time, but
> whatever. It works :)

--
David Leonard                           David.Leonard@csee.uq.edu.au
Dept of Comp. Sci. and Elec. Engg   _   Room:78-624  Ph:+61 7 336 52447
The University of Queensland       |+|  http://www.csee.uq.edu.au/~leonard/
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