NTP on HP-UX

[cah]

laxm1311 (SAP R/3) - HP superdome was having clock issue yesterday.
It ran faster and caused application servers not to synchronize with the DB server.

Duane Fletcher helped kill the process (/usr/sbin/xntpd) and ran it again to sync the clock.
After 2 hours, the clock was again 5 minutes ahead.

In syslog, it showed the following line numerous times:

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Nov 12 19:57:10 laxm1311 xntpd[1835]: Unsynchronized, possible remote server failure  or defective hardware clock

Due to Sunday's overheat situation, many hardware components would fail over time. This is the first of all.
Eventually, HP replaced the hardware component and it was back to normal but I was checking how ntp was set up and whether it is configured as a time server because it didn't look like a time server. All application servers were syncing from laxm1311 but they didn't sync with laxm1311 and that's why the application was not in sync with database server.

From /etc/rc.log:

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Start time synchronization
Output from "/sbin/rc2.d/S660xntpd start":
----------------------------
12 Nov 01:01:52 ntpdate[4167]: step time server 144.15.255.25 offset -11.15630
1 sec
xntpd

That means admin should use the following commands to stop and start NTPD rather than killing process and run the command directly.

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/sbin/rc2.d/S660xntpd stop
/sbin/rc2.d/S660xntpd start

Digging deeper, there are a couple more important files that include necessary configurations in them.

In /sbin/rc2.d/S660xntpd, it reads /etc/rc.config.
/etc/rc.config reads config from /etc/rc.config.d/* and the key file is /etc/rc.config.d/netdaemons.
In it, there is the following section that specifies NTPD config:

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######################################
# xntp configuration.  See xntpd(1m) #
######################################
#
#  Time synchronization daemon
#
# NTPDATE_SERVER: name of trusted timeserver to synchronize with at boot
# (default is rootserver for diskess clients)
# XNTPD:        Set to 1 to start xntpd (0 to not run xntpd)
# XNTPD_ARGS:  command line arguments for xntpd
#
# Also, see the /etc/ntp.conf and /etc/ntp.keys file for additional
# configuration.
#
export NTPDATE_SERVER="144.15.255.25"
export XNTPD=1
export XNTPD_ARGS=