[Sussex] NTP Weirdness

[Steve Dobson]

Morning

My thanks all for your suggestions on what was causing the clock on a
server system to go haywire.

Jon's suggestion to change the kernel config to use the pmtmr clock
setting in the kernel did the trick.  So thanks Jon.

This is how I configured it on my Debian system (should be more or less
the same on Ubuntu - other distros may differ).

1). Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

2). Find the kernel options config line (it looks like a comment) and
add "clock=pmtr".

  ## ## Start Default Options ##
  ## default kernel options
  ## default kernel options for automagic boot options
  ## If you want special options for specific kernels use kopt_x_y_z
  ## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted.
  ## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro
  ##      kopt_2_6_8=root=/dev/hdc1 ro
  ##      kopt_2_6_8_2_686=root=/dev/hdc2 ro
BEFORE:
  # kopt=root=UUID=70b90c16-97d0-433c-852f-fa17631c89f3 ro

AFTER:
  # kopt=root=UUID=70b90c16-97d0-433c-852f-fa17631c89f3 clock=pmtmr ro

Your kopt setting may well look different, I'm using UUIDs to identify
the disk on this system you may see a device name like /dev/hda1
or /dev/sda1.

3). Run "update-grub" to apply the new kernel options to the various
kernel boot options.  Note: this script is also run when a new kernel is
installed (due to a security fix for example) so by setting the option
this way it will be applied to any future kernels installed.

4). Reboot so the kernel is run with the new option.

5). Set up ntpd as normal.

Steve