check_ntp_peer unreliable on macs

[Keith Erekson]

I found this in my mailing list archives, while looking for information about check_ntp_peer. As far as I can tell, nobody ever answered you...

I was just looking into this exact problem. If you check the verbose output, you will probably see something like this:

0 candiate peers available
warning: no synchronization source found
warning: LI_ALARM bit is set

I do get valid output from "ntpq -p hostname", however.

Apparently, the problems with OS X's NTP are well-known and documented. For example,

http://knol.google.com/k/dirk-h-schulz/time-synchronization-ntp-on-mac-os-x/2bcee0ik2900p/18#
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/KnownOsIssues#Section_9.2.5

As a way around this, I thought I would just use check_ntp_time, to compare the xserve's clock against that of the nagios box. However, no luck there either:

sending request to peer 0
response from peer 0: offset -0.9300264975
sending request to peer 0
response from peer 0: offset -0.9299369976
sending request to peer 0
response from peer 0: offset -0.9299154976
sending request to peer 0
response from peer 0: offset -0.9298709977
discarding peer 0: stratum=0
overall average offset: 0
NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown|


It seems that OS X is responding as a stratum 0 server, which is a no-no.

Also, while fiddling with check_ntp_peer, I noticed that it doesn't seem to accept a port (-p or --port), as the help output suggests it should be able to. Am I crazy?

-Keith





    Message: 24
    Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:13:58 -0500
    From: Peter Doherty <doherty at crystal.harvard.edu>
    Subject: [Nagios-users] check_ntp_peer unreliable on macs
    To: nagios-user Mailinglist <nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
    Message-ID: <8708358F-E3D4-4778-A90D-0C5C533CE746 at crystal.harvard.edu>
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

    I've got Nagios monitoring several Macs, and I'd like to know that NTP  
    is running okay on them, since if the time drifts by a few minutes,  
    Kerberos Authentication stops working.
    It seems that some of the newest Macs work okay, pretty much any of  
    the Intel Macs running 10.5 Leopard work, but on any of the 10.4 Tiger  
    Macs, I just get
    " NTP CRITICAL: Server not synchronized, Offset unknown "

    I'm simply running check_ntp_peer -H localhost

    Any suggestions on if this can be fixed somehow?

    Thanks
    --Peter



    ------------------------------



-- 

Keith Erekson
Systems Engineer
Digirati Consulting
erekson at digiraticonsulting.com


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