In cron.log I can see that ntpdate is being triggered from a cron job which is running daily at 23:15
Mar 10 23:15:01 seitan /USR/SBIN/CRON[22407]: (root) CMD (/etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate)
But I cannot seem to find the cron job that is causing these messages to fill up my syslog
Mar 10 23:15:01 seitan ntpdate[22416]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting
I'm guessing I need to change this cron job to stop the ntp service before this command executes, then start it again afterwards, but I don't know where this is being triggered from. I have checked the cron.daily directory and it only contains a file ntp
which only seems to rotate the ntp stats (contents below):
#!/bin/sh
# The default Debian ntp.conf enables logging of various statistics to
# the /var/log/ntpstats directory. The daemon automatically changes
# to a new datestamped set of files at midnight, so all we need to do
# is delete old ones, and compress the ones we're keeping so disk
# usage is controlled.
statsdir=$(cat /etc/ntp.conf | grep -v '^#' | sed -n 's/statsdir \([^ ][^ ]*\)/\1/p')
if [ -n "$statsdir" ] && [ -d "$statsdir" ]; then
# only keep a week's depth of these
find "$statsdir" -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;
# compress whatever is left to save space
cd "$statsdir"
ls *stats.???????? > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
# Note that gzip won't compress the file names that
# are hard links to the live/current files, so this
# compresses yesterday and previous, leaving the live
# log alone. We supress the warnings gzip issues
# about not compressing the linked file.
gzip --best --quiet *stats.????????
return=$?
case $return in
2)
exit 0 # squash all warnings
;;
*)
exit $return # but let real errors through
;;
esac
fi
fi
I have never touched any of the ntp configuration in the system.