Mac – Configure Snow Leopard Server as NTP server for private LAN with no Internet access

macntposx-snow-leopard

I have a Snow Leopard Server box running on a private LAN with no Internet access. If you can avoid ever doing this, you should, as not having an Internet connection has brought us hours and hours of headaches.

Anyway, our most recent headache is that Open Directory users can't authenticate with Kerberos as the client computers' individual clocks drift from the server's clock. So the server also needs to be an NTP server.

I cannot figure out how to configure the server so that it will respond to client requests in a way that they trust. Here's what a query looks like from a client machine:

$ ntpdate -q 192.168.1.250
server 192.168.1.250, stratum 16, offset 8.010421, delay 0.02605
 2 Sep 16:32:23 ntpdate[346]: no server suitable for synchronization found

Here are my configuration files on the server:

/etc/ntp.conf

server 192.168.1.250
fudge 127.0.0.1 stratum 8 refid NIST

/etc/ntp-restrict.conf

restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict -6 ::1
restrict 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 nomodify notrap

includefile /private/etc/ntp.conf

Update

This is the configuration that I went with.

These 2 files are configured, and the NTP service is turned on in Server Admin under the General tab, and these 2 files are configured thusly:

/etc/ntp.conf

server 127.127.1.1
fudge 127.127.1.1 stratum 8 refid NIST

/etc/ntp-restrict.conf

restrict default notrust nomodify
restrict 127.127.1.1 mask 255.255.0.0 nomodify
restrict 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 nomodify
includefile /private/etc/ntp.conf

Then the clients are configured to point to this server by name. It works perfectly.

Best Answer

IIRC, ntpdate is used to set times, but ntpd is used to maintain the time on a system.

Look in Server Admin --> --> Settings for the NTP on/off check box. Don't worry about the config files.

If you can't get a solution from the GUI, then the following website might help: http://docsrv.sco.com/NET_tcpip/ntpT.no_inet.html

Good luck.