I have been tasked with getting an NTP client working on two Linux machines and an OpenBSD machine.
The machines are arranged like this:
NTPServer
/ \
/ \
L1 L2
\ /
\ /
OpenBSD
I have been told to configure L1 and L2 to route packets from OpenBSD to the NTPServer (ie not to set up a new stratum). The OpenBSD box cannot see the NTPServer (ie the network configuration prohibits this - from the OpenBSD box I can't even ping the IP address of the NTPServer).
Now the bad news: I am a J2EE programmer :) I don't have much of an idea on how to proceed.
Where do I begin? I'm not looking for a full solution as obviously people don't know the network configuration, just a few pointers as to where to start. I know Linux pretty well in terms of the stuff associated with J2EE (installing Tomcat/JBoss, setting them up as services etc) but network routing is really very new to me and has always scared me (ever since I had to write some Java code to detect a BGP flip).
Edit
Ok, thanks to Google I have made some progress. All the above is wrong (apart from me being a J2EE programmer)...
With use of ifconfig
, routes show
, traceroute
, and some internal documentation, I now have the following diagram:
NTP
10.21.3.169
| \______________
| \
10.21.3.160 (eth1) |
L1 |
10.0.0.67 (eth0) |
| |
| |
10.0.0.65 (pcn1) |
OpenBSD |
10.0.0.51 (pcn0) |
| |
| |
10.0.0.49 (eth1) 10.21.3.159 (eth0)
L2
I have also checked the time on the three machines, and the Linux ones are correct while the OpenBSD one is wrong, so I think I just need to sort the routing out so that the OpenBSD box can get the time from NTP via either of the Linux boxes.
So, I think I need to add a route to the OpenBSD box to tell it that to get to our NTP server, it needs to go via L1 (it could also go via L2 but the diagram I have seen makes that look incorrect).