ntpd has been running for an hour on a server. You want a table of the configured servers with their stratum, poll interval and current offset, in which the peer the daemon has actually selected is marked. Which command produces it?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 108. Essential system services medium
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct ntpq -p
Correct. -p prints the peer list of the local ntpd, one row per association, with a tally character in the first column — an asterisk marking the selected system peer and a plus sign marking candidates.
Not correct ntpd -p /run/ntpd.pid
Wrong. On the daemon itself, -p names the file in which ntpd should write its process id at start-up. Running ntpd again would attempt to start a second daemon, not query the first.
Not correct ntpstat
Wrong for this task, though it is a real tool. ntpstat prints a short summary of whether the clock is synchronised, to which stratum and within what margin, and sets its exit status accordingly. It never lists the individual peers.
Not correct chronyc tracking
Wrong on two counts. chronyc is chrony's client and cannot query ntpd, and `tracking` reports the state of the local clock — reference id, stratum, offset, skew — rather than a table of peers.
Why
ntpq is the monitoring front end to ntpd, and `ntpq -p` is the one invocation the exam expects you to recognise. Read the first column as the selection state: a space or x means rejected, a minus means outlyer, a plus means a survivor eligible for combining, and an asterisk means the current system peer. The chrony equivalent of that table is `chronyc sources`.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page ntpq(8)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 108 and space the ones you get wrong.
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