ntpd Tests

Compelled by the temptation of my recent post regarding ntpd improvements in OpenBSD-current, I put OpenBSD on an old Packard Bell and ran some tests.

This, I hope, will document how I did it for posterity's sake.

1. ntpd is usually started by the system in /etc/rc.conf or /etc/rc.conf.local. Screw that. Remove or comment out any lines in these files that begin with "ntpd_flags=".
   
   
2. Find the ntpd process if it is running. "ps -aux | grep ntpd". OpenNTPD runs in privilege separation mode, so you must run "kill -TERM XXX", where XXX is the pid of the root-owned ntpd process, not the one owned by the "_ntp" user.
   
   
3. Download and install daemontools.
   
   
4. Create a new daemontools service for ntpd:

   # mkdir -p /usr/local/ntpd/log/main
   # mkdir -p /usr/local/ntpd/log/adjust
   # chmod -R 02755 /usr/local/ntpd
   # chmod +t /usr/local/ntpd
   # cat /usr/local/ntpd/run
   #!/bin/sh
   exec 2>&1
   exec /usr/sbin/ntpd -d
   # cat /usr/local/ntpd/log/run
   #!/bin/sh
   exec multilog t \ 
   -* '+* adjust*' ./adjust \
   +* ./main
   # chmod 0755 /usr/local/ntpd/run
   # chmod 0755 /usr/local/ntpd/log/run
   # ln -sf /usr/local/ntpd /service
   

Complicated? Yes. Useful? You bet. This will take the "adjusting local clock by 0.005s" messages that would ordinarily be written to /var/log/daemon and put them in /service/ntpd/log/adjust/current. This is more complicated than "grep 'adjust' /var/log/daemon", but it's also in my opinion easier to maintain.

I'm running this setup on two systems: a 3.9-current system and an OpenBSD 3.8 system without the ntpd improvements. I'm going to let this run for a while (a looong while if I get distracted and forget about all of this) and then see if the 3.9-current logs provide smaller, more finely-tuned adjustments over time.