Re: [chrony-users] chrony not switching to stratum 10 after loss of references

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The  local time is the time on your compter. So you want to set the time on
your computer to itself. Not a very useful thing to do. There is not some
maging clock. Chrony will keep reporting its own time as long as its estimate
of the error in your local time is small enoght. Why not? It has spent much
time getting the local erros down, but fitting to to tfind the offset and the
rate of the local clock. So many people decide to test by sutting off all
imput, and expectingchrony to do something weid to allevate the problem. Trust
that the designers of chrony have thought about what to do in that case and to
try to delive the best time they can, even in that situation. (and using the
local clock to set itself is almost never the best solution, since that throws
awy all of the work it has done fguring out what the best parameters are to
keep the local clock on track for a long time).

William G. Unruh __| Canadian Institute for|____ Tel: +1(604)822-3273
Physics&Astronomy _|___ Advanced Research _|____ Fax: +1(604)822-5324
UBC, Vancouver,BC _|_ Program in Cosmology |____ unruh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Canada V6T 1Z1 ____|____ and Gravity ______|_    theory.physics.ubc.ca/

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023, Charbonneau, André wrote:

[CAUTION: Non-UBC Email]

Hi,

 

I’m having a problem with a system configured as a stratum 1 NTP server, running chrony, and I can’t
seem to be able to figure out what is happening and what might be the root cause of the problem.

(details about the setup are at the end of this message)

 

 

Basically, my stratum 1 servers takes a 1PPS and NMEA timecode on a serial port.  It also runs gpsd. 
I’ve configured the SHM references as such in /etc/chrony.conf:

 

# Configure NMEA + 1PPS via shared memory:

refclock SHM 0 refid NMEA precision 1e-1 offset 0.000109

refclock SHM 1 refid PPS offset 0.0 precision 1e-7

<… snip …>

local stratum 10

 

With this configuration, chrony is happy, sees the 2 signals (e.g., reach of 377 on each) and serves
time as a stratum 1 server.  All good so far.

 

 

 

But then I intentionally stop the 1PPS and timecode signals to simulate a failure of the upstream
reference.  Because of the “local stratum 10”, I was expecting chrony to switch stratum 10
automatically when the reach value reaches 0 on those 2 references, but this is definitely not what
I’m seeing.

 

Instead, it seems like chrony continues to be a stratum 1, long after the reference signal have been
terminated. 

For example, the chrony sources and tracking command output below was taken approx. 1 hour after
termination of 1PPS and NMEA signal:

 

$ sudo date; sudo chronyc sources; sudo chronyc tracking

Wed Jun 14 08:23:00 PM UTC 2023

MS Name/IP address         Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample              

===============================================================================

#? NMEA                          0   4     0   57m    -93us[  -93us] +/-  100ms

#? PPS                           0   4     0   57m    +98ns[ +346ns] +/-  101ns

Reference ID    : 50505300 (PPS)

Stratum         : 1

Ref time (UTC)  : Wed Jun 14 19:25:50 2023

System time     : 0.000000041 seconds fast of NTP time

Last offset     : +0.000000256 seconds

RMS offset      : 0.000000151 seconds

Frequency       : 12.835 ppm fast

Residual freq   : +0.006 ppm

Skew            : 0.008 ppm

Root delay      : 0.000000001 seconds

Root dispersion : 0.003475379 seconds

Update interval : 16.0 seconds

Leap status     : Normal

 

I’ve also confirmed that it still happily serves time at stratum 1 level if I query it from another
system (using ntpdate tool for example from another system). 

 

Is this normal and expected?  I was expecting chrony to fallback to stratum 10 but this is not what is
happening.

 

There is probably something obvious I’m missing in my chrony.conf file to implement the desired
behavior but I’m not able to figure it out.

 

Anyone else experienced this before?

 

 

System and setup info:

 

HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF

chrony version 4.3

gpsd 3.23.1-1.el9

AlmaLinux release 9.2 (Turquoise Kodkod)

Linux 5.14.0-284.11.1.el9_2.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue May 9 05:49:00 EDT 2023 x86_64 x86_64
x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

chrony.conf:

 

refclock SHM 0 refid NMEA precision 1e-1 offset 0.000109

refclock SHM 1 refid PPS offset 0.0 precision 1e-7

driftfile /var/lib/chrony/drift

leapsecmode system

makestep 1.0 3

rtcsync

hwtimestamp *

minsources 1

allow ***.***.0.0/16

local stratum 10

logdir /var/log/chrony

log measurements statistics tracking refclocks tempcomp

 

 

 

 

Any information or insights about this would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks,

  Andre

 

 

--

Andre Charbonneau

 

Frequency & Time

Metrology Research Centre

National Research Council Canada / Government of Canada

andre.charbonneau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx / 613-993-3129

 

Fréquence et temps

Centre de recherche en métrologie

Conseil national de recherches Canada / Gouvernement du Canada

andre.charbonneau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx / 613-993-3129

 




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