• There is a dedicated page for general NTP.
• There is a dedicated page for public NTP servers.

show ntp

or

set maintenancemode
show ntpstats

You can exit maintenance mode with

set maintenancemode off

Time can be set under Grid Properties. Rememeber that you cannot set the time manually if the Grid is set to sync time from external servers (Grid NTP Settings).

When the Grid Member joins the Grid Master and the time difference between Grid Member and the Grid Master is more than 60 seconds, then Grid Member restarts to adjust time with Grid Master and logs: “System restart: time reset…”.

Infoblox will not 'jump' time. If NIOS finds itself out-of-sync, it will slowly bring itself back into sync.

1,988 seconds (33 minutes and 8 seconds)to fix an error of 1 second.

e.g. an offset of 47 seconds would take the following to fix

• 93,436 seconds
• OR 1,558 minutes
• OR 26 hours

One (nasty) solution to get NIOS back in sync is the following

1. Disable syncing to external NTP servers
2. Update Grid Settings and you can now set the time. Set the time exactly to something about 15 seconds from now and click okay. You will be told that proceeding will restart the Grid Master. Wait until actual time matches the time you set and press okay.
3. The Grid Master will restart.
4. Log back into the Grid and enable syncing to external NTP servers.
5. This should get the time back to close enough to perfect so that NIOS doesn't complain. If not, it should be close enough that it won't take very long to sync up.

If you get NTP out of sync and it only affects vNIOS and not physical Infoblox devices, verify whether there is a pattern when the NTP goes out of sync. It is possible that vNIOS goes out of sync when a VM snapshot is taken. vNIOS may also go out of sync during vMotion (moving the vNIOS from one ESXI server to other), as vMotion may cause local clocks to differ in time.

Issue the CLI command show ntp four or more times in a 15 minute interval to show whether the offset is gradually growing. In a normal NTP time sync, the offset should decrease gradually as the NTP program tries to slew down the time difference. If we find that the external clock offset is gradually growing, consider configuring another external NTP source to confirm whether the issue is with the currently configured NTP source.

Log messages saying Frequency exceeded are displayed when the time computed by NTPD and the time reported by the system's internal clock exceed 500 PPM.

The frequency stability of an electronic oscillator component can be measured in ppm, one parts-per-million is 0.0001% (IE-6). Even an error of only 0.001% causes a clock to be off by almost one second per day. If the difference exceeds 500 parts-per-million (0.0005%) over the synchronization interval, the log frequency exceeded message appears in the logs.

To display NTP data, use the show ntp command.

Infoblox > show ntp
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
 127.127.1.1     .LOCL.          12 l   5h   64    0    0.000   +0.000   0.000
+212.23.8.6      195.66.241.3     2 u   42  128  377   10.700   -0.329   0.265
+212.23.10.129   85.199.214.99    2 u   32  128  377   16.991   -0.517   0.488
*85.199.214.98   .GPS.            1 u   13   64  377   11.410   -0.170   0.172

When you execute the show ntp command, the NIOS appliance displays the following information:

• remote: The IP address of the remote peer.
• refid: Identifies the reference clock. This will be the clock type if the NTP server is Stratum 1. If it is Stratam 2 or higher then the refid will be the IP address of the NTP server's time source. (See Note on Refid)
• st: The stratum of the remote peer. Indicates the stratum of the configured clock. Infoblox recommends that an external stratum 1 clock be configured as the NTP server if you are running an enterprise network. Other stratum clocks, such as stratum 2 or 3, can be configured as the NTP server when the Grid Member or Grid Master is blocked by the firewall and cannot reach the external stratum 1 clock.
• t: The type of the peer, such as local (l), unicast (u) or broadcast (b).
• when: When the last packet was received, in seconds.
• poll: The polling interval, in seconds.
• reach: The reachability register, in octal numerals. Reach value represents the status of the last eight NTP transactions between the NTP daemon and a given remote time server in octet. This reach value should read 377. If it is not 377, run a traffic capture on the Grid Master or on the Grid Members that show NTP out of sync and see if there are responses from external NTP servers on UDP port 123.
• delay: The current estimated delay, in seconds. Should be as low as possible. 1 - 10 is superbe. 11 - 20 great. 20 - 30 is more common and not bad. >100 is not so great. Delay (Latency) is the delay between the Local clock (NIOS appliance) and the external NTP servers. Delay varies depending upon the distance and network latency of the external NTP server. Normally, the delay can be between 5-40 Milliseconds. Choose the server with the least possible delay before configuring NTP.
• offset: The offset of the peer clock relative to the local clock, in milliseconds. The value should be something like (0.517). This means there is less than a second difference. If you see something line 39256.2 then your clock is about 39 second out-of-sync and it will take some time to correct (see above). Offset is the time difference in milliseconds from the external NTP server and local clock. Offset value more than 300 seconds (300,000 milliseconds) need a step change which need the ntpdate command. The ntpdate command is executed during product restart. If you notice offset more than 300 seconds, please consider doing a product restart as there is no other way to run the ntpdate command.
• jitter: The estimated time error of the system clock. Should be a value less than 1.0. Ideally as close to 0.000 as possible (e.g. 0.205).