0day_dev/ntpclient-2018_244

ntpclient

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Usage
• Troubleshooting
• Bugs
• Compliance
• Building
• Building from GIT
• Origin & References

Introduction

ntpclient is an NTP client for UNIX-like systems, RFC 1305 and RFC 4330. Its functionality is a small subset of ntpd, chrony, OpenNTPd, and xntpd. Since it is much smaller, it is also more relevant for embedded systems in need of only a client.

Please report bugs to the GitHub issue tracker. If you want to contribute fixes or new features, see the file CONTRIBUTING.md.

Usage

All arguments are optional, ntpclient defaults to use pool.ntp.org.

Usage: ntpclient [options] [SERVER]
 
 -c count      Stop after count time measurements. Default: 0 (forever)
 -d            Debug, or diagnostics mode  Possible to enable more at compile
 -f frequency  Initialize the frequency offset.  Linux only, requires root
 -g goodness   Stop after getting a result more accurate than goodness msec,
               microseconds. Default: 0 (forever)
 -h            Show summary of command line options and exit
 -i interval   Check time every interval seconds.  Default: 600
 -l            Attempt to lock local clock to server using adjtimex(2)
 -L            Use syslog instead of stdout for log messages, enabled
               by default when started as root
 -n            Don't fork.  Prevents ntpclient from daemonizing by default
               Only when running as root, does nothing for regular users
               Use -L with this to use syslog as well, for Finit + systemd
 -p port       NTP client UDP port.  Default: 0 ("any available")
 -q min_delay  Minimum packet delay for transaction (default 800 microseconds)
 -s            Simple clock set, implies -c 1 unliess -l is also set
 -t            Trust network and server, no RFC-4330 recommended validation
 -v            Be verbose.  This option will cause time sync events, hostname
               lookup errors and program version to be displayed
 -V            Display version and copyright information
 
 SERVER        Optional NTP server to sync with, default: pool.ntp.org

Mortal users can use this program for monitoring, but not clock setting (with the -s or -l switches). The -l switch is designed to be robust in any network environment, but has seen the most extensive testing in a low latency (less than 2 ms) Ethernet environment. Users in other environments should study ntpclient's behavior, and be prepared to adjust internal tuning parameters. A long description of how and why to use ntpclient is in the HowTo file. ntpclient always sends packets to the server's UDP port 123.

One commonly needed tuning parameter for lock mode is min_delay, the shortest possible round-trip transaction time. This can be set with the command line -q switch. The historical default of 800 microseconds was good for local Ethernet hardware a few years ago. If it is set too high, you will get a lot of "inconsistent" lines in the log file when time locking (-l switch). The only true future-proof value is 0, but that will cause the local time to wander more than it should. Setting it to 200 is recommended on an end client.

The test.dat file that is part of the source distribution has 200 lines of sample output. Its first few lines, with the output column headers that are shown when the -d option is chosen, are:

  day    second   elapsed    stall      skew  dispersion  freq
36765 00180.386    1398.0     40.3  953773.9       793.5  -1240000
36765 00780.382    1358.0     41.3  954329.0       915.5  -1240000
36765 01380.381    1439.0     56.0  954871.3       915.5  -1240000

• day, second: time of measurement, UTC, relative to NTP epoch (Jan 1, 1900)
• elapsed: total time from query to response (microseconds)
• stall: time the server reports that it sat on the request (microseconds)
• skew: difference between local time and server time (microseconds)
• dispersion: reported by server, see RFC 1305 (microseconds)
• freq: local clock frequency adjustment (Linux only, ppm*65536)

ntclient performs a series of sanity checks on UDP packets received, as recommended by RFC 4330. If it fails one of these tests, the line described above is replaced by 36765 01380.381 rejected packet or, if --enable-debug was selected at configure, one of:

36765 01380.381  rejected packet: LI==3
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: VN<3
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: MODE!=3
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: ORG!=sent
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: XMT==0
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: abs(DELAY)>65536
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: abs(DISP)>65536
36765 01380.381  rejected packet: STRATUM==0

To see the actual values of the rejected packet, start ntpclient with the -d option; this will give a human-readable printout of every packet received, including the rejected ones. To skip these checks, use the -t switch.

The file test.dat is suitable for piping into ntpclient -r. There are more than 200000 samples (lines) archived for study. They are generally spaced 10 minutes apart, representing over three years of data logging (from a variety of machines, and not continuous, unfortunately). If you are interested, contact Larry.

Also included is a version of the adjtimex(1) tool. See its man page and the HowTo file for more information.

Another tool is envelope, which is a perl script that was used for the lock studies. It's kind of a hack and not worth documenting here.

Troubleshooting

Some really old Linux systems (e.g., Red Hat EL-3.0 and Ubuntu 4.10) have a totally broken POSIX clock_settime() implementation. If you get the following with ntpclient -s:

clock_settime: Invalid argument

then configure --enable-obsolete. Linux systems that are even older will not even compile without that switch set.

Bugs

• Doesn't understand the LI (Leap second Indicator) field of an NTP packet
• Doesn't interact with adjtimex(2) status value
• Cannot query multiple servers
• Requires Linux select() semantics, where timeout value is modified

Compliance

Adherence to RFC 4330 chapter 10, Best practices:

1. Enforced, unless someone tinkers with the source code
2. No backoff, but no retry either; this isn't TCP
3. Not in scope for the upstream source
4. Defaults to pool.ntp.org, but is configurable
5. Not in scope for the upstream source
6. Supported
7. Supported, connection to server reopened once a day
8. Not supported (scary opportunity to DOS the client)

Building

ntpclient uses the GNU configure & build system:

    ./configure
    make

The GNU build system use /usr/local as the default install prefix. In many cases this is useful, but many users expect /usr or /opt. To install into /usr/sbin/ntpclient and /usr/bin/adjtimex:

    ./configure --prefix=/usr
    make
    sudo make install-strip

The last command installs, there is also a possiblity to uninstall all files using:

    sudo make uninstall

For changing the system clock frequency, only the Linux adjtimex(2) interface is implemented at this time. Non-Linux systems can only use ntpclient to measure time differences and set the system clock, by way of the POSIX 1003.1-2001 standard, the routines clock_gettime() and clock_settime(). Also, see section Bugs, below.

There are a few compile-time configurations possible. E.g., for older Linux kernels, before the tickless erea (pre 3.0), you want to:

    ./configure --disable-siocgstamp

However, first try without changing the default. That gives you a full- featured ntpclient that uses modern POSIX time functions and works reasonably well with any Linux kernel.

Solaris and other UNIX users may need to adjust the CFLAGS slightly. For other options, see ./configure --help

Building from GIT

If you want to contribute, or try out the latest unreleased features, here is a few things to know about GNU build system:

• configure.ac and a per-directory Makefile.am are key files
• configure and Makefile.in are generated from autogen.sh, they are not stored in GIT but automatically generated for the release tarballs
• Makefile is generated by configure script

To build from GIT you first need to clone the repository and run the autogen.sh script. This requires automake and autoconf to be installed on your system.

    git clone https://github.com/troglobit/ntpclient.git
    cd ntpclient/
    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure && make

Remember: GIT sources are a moving target and are not recommended for production systems, unless you know what you are doing!

Origin & References

Larry Doolittle created ntpclient and made it freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. He remains the official upstream for ntpclient.

This fork at GitHub is maintained by Joachim Nilsson and adds a few features like syslog, background daemon, IPv6, and systemd support. As well as a few other small things.