On 10/13/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Romain Kang</b> <<a href="mailto:romain@kzsu.stanford.edu">romain@kzsu.stanford.edu</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
-500 is the largest negative value that ntpd uses. In short, it<br>has freaked out and all bets are off. Worse, if ntpd starts with<br>such a large value, good hardware will drift off to false values.<br>Every so often, when the discrepancy is large, ntpd will force a
<br>step correction, and the error will follow a sawtooth pattern<br>over a period of several days.</blockquote><div><br>Mmm. I see. I deleted the drift file, and ntpd has recreated it with 0.000; I'm not sure what effect this will have on ntpd's performance.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The units for delay, offset, and jitter are milliseconds. By<br>comparison, my mythbox typically sees delays < 90 ms to Redhat's
<br>NTP server on the other side of the US, with jitter and offsets<br>less than 20 ms. If you're seeing values in the multi-second range,<br>it would appear your WAN connection can't uniformly deliver NTP<br>packets, certainly not along the paths to those servers. One
<br>assumption in the original NTP implementation was that roundtrip<br>delays were symmetric; no wonder ntpd is going insane.</blockquote><div><br>Right-- I was afraid of that. I'm wondering if the fact that my torrents hog bandwidth are affecting that.
<br><br>Incidentally-- yes, I'm using a wireless network; usually, ntp works just fine. Lately, though, the time has been a bit wacky. There's been quite a bit of torrent activity on my end, which is making me wonder if that's relevant.
<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Perhaps there's some hardware glitch on your box, but if it were<br>that bad, I'd expect MythTV to be unwatchable.
</blockquote><div><br>MythTV, in general, runs just smoothly. Nevertheless, I'll try turning off ntp for a few days and see how the system
deals with it. If, for some reason, I do find there's a hardware
issue-- the hardware clock is just slow or keeps resetting, for
instance-- do I need to replace the motherboard? Or can the battery on
the motherboard be replaced?<br>
<br>Thanks again!<br>Jack.<br></div></div>