Best practices for NTP updating in VirtualBox virtual machines without guest additions?

Question

I have a couple of VMs that cannot have guest additions installed, and I pause and resume them with days between. I normally forget to nudge NTP when I start up the VM. Is there a good way to tell ntp to be very aggressive in how often it should check for changes?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 02 '12 at 14:52

I know you said you couldn't install them, but it's worth saying that the machine additions were created (at least partially) to solve this problem; and should be the solution.

ntpd can only be set to ignore wild offsets at startup; so you'll have to configure the machines to run ntpdate via cron or similar.

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 02 '12 at 17:48

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The Vmware suggested NTP configuration for a similar issue will almost certainly apply here.

You need to set the tinker panic 0. Make sure your system is not using the local clock as a high stratum server.

answered Mar 02 '12 at 17:48

Zoredache

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 12 '16 at 02:57

0

There's also an option to attach ntpdate to network interface up event, which is triggered on guest resume ( man devd for FreeBSD )

answered Nov 12 '16 at 02:57

Eugene Petrov

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Best practices for NTP updating in VirtualBox virtual machines without guest additions?

3 Answers3