Does Entware ntpd and firmware ntp conflict?

[atx32]

Do Entware ntpd and firmware ntp conflict?

I'm using Merlin 374.43 on an N66U, and have installed Entware so that I can run ntpd among other things. I have a question about the interaction of this daemon with an ntp process I see running by default in the firmware. I don't know all that this ntp process does and if it will conflict in any way. The only thing in the syslog I see happening at boot time is that once the system time is set that ntp restarts miniupnpd and disk_monitor.

Jul 15 07:43:59 rc_service: ntp 557:notify_rc restart_upnp
Jul 15 07:43:59 rc_service: ntp 557:notify_rc restart_diskmon
Jul 15 07:43:59 rc_service: waitting "restart_upnp" via ntp ...
Jul 15 07:43:59 miniupnpd[553]: shutting down MiniUPnPd
Jul 15 07:43:59 miniupnpd[630]: HTTP listening on port 48611
Jul 15 07:43:59 miniupnpd[630]: Listening for NAT-PMP/PCP traffic on port 5351
Jul 15 07:43:59 disk monitor: be idle

I don't know if I should I should kill ntp as part of the ntpd startup or leave it alone. I did notice if I kill it that it is restarted later by udhcpc (which then restarts miniupnpd and disk_monitor.)

Jul 24 03:21:53 rc_service: udhcpc 4425:notify_rc stop_ntpc
Jul 24 03:21:53 rc_service: udhcpc 4425:notify_rc start_ntpc
Jul 24 03:21:53 dhcp client: bound 192.168.1.64 via 192.168.1.254 during 30 seconds.
Jul 24 03:21:55 WAN Connection: WAN was restored.
Jul 24 03:23:17 rc_service: ntp 4466:notify_rc restart_upnp
Jul 24 03:23:17 rc_service: ntp 4466:notify_rc restart_diskmon

So what does the firmware's ntp process do and should I leave it alone? Or will it cause problems for ntpd and I'll need to find a way to permanently kill it?

Bill

 

[atx32]

I think I figured this out by looking at the firmware source code. The ntp process will periodically sync the time to the NTP server set in the web UI, so given I'm running ntpd I had to find a way to prevent that. By clearing the server setting in nvram I can leave the ntp process running (since it gets restarted anyway) and it will not attempt to set the time.

nvram set ntp_server0=""
nvram commit

With that everything seems to work fine and ntpd is the only process managing time synchronization.