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27th Jan 2004, 7:06am

ntpdate - no server suitable for synchronization found (3)

I've previously reported on a reason why you might get the message "no server suitable for synchronization found" from ntpdate.

Well I just received some correspondence from David Gessel who had a different cause for the message. I will quote from his letter to me:

I tried

ntpdate -b -p 8 

and got no server suitable for synchronization found

Searching I found someone suggesting that the problem was related to network saturation so I tried

ntpdate -b -t 4 -p 4 

and got step time server 129.6.15.28 offset 0.166414 sec - just right. I edited my init.d/ntpd file to read

         if [ -s "$ntpstep" -o -n "$dostep" ]; then
             # Synchronize with servers if step-tickers exists
             # or the -x option is used
             echo -n $"$prog: Synchronizing with time server: "
             /usr/sbin/ntpdate -s -b -t 4 -p 4 $tickers
                                     ^^^^^^^^^^
             RETVAL=$?
             [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && success || failure
             echo
             if [ $RETVAL -ne 0 ]; then
                     OPTIONS="$OPTIONS -g"
             fi

-t 4 sets the timeout to 4 seconds (from 1, "suitable for LAN applicatons") and -p 8 sets the number of averaged samples back to the default, RH9 at least sets the larger number of averages, but with the longer time out you could in theory be waiting 32 seconds. After the initial ntpdate config, everything will sync up with ntpq which defaults to 5000 msec.