Missing debug message details or documentation

[svenseeberg]

I'm operating 3 OpenBSD 7.2 systems in an offline network, one of them being a Raspberry Pi. As the Raspberry has no clock, it should sync the time from one of the other 2 desktop PCs.

On both desktop PCs with clocks the ntpd is listening on port 123. I can sort of verify this by stopping the service on one the desktop PCs and running ntpd -d on the Raspberry Pi:

root@raspi # ntpd -d
ntp engine ready
recvmsg 192.168.3.2: Connection refused
reply from 192.168.3.3: not synced (alarm), next query 3123s

With the ntpd services listening on the desktop PCs, I can see the following output:

root@raspi # ntpd -d
ntp engine ready
reply from 192.168.3.2: not synced (alarm), next query 3097s
reply from 192.168.3.3: not synced (alarm), next query 3123s

ntpctl -s all shows a ---- peer not valid ---- for both remote IPs.

I tried to find information about the meaning of the message not synced (alarm) but could not find anything in the man pages or forum/mailing list discussions. It seems impossible (without turning to the source code & gdb) to find out what is going wrong. It would be extremely helpful to provide more details in the messages that help addressing the issues.

For further debugging, I also tried to use rdate:

rdate 192.168.3.
rdate: ignoring NTP server with alarm flag set
rdate: Unable to get a reasonable time estimate

The messages, together with the (alarm) substring from the ntpd -d output, suggest that there is an alarm flag set somewhere. It is not obvious what this means or how to proceed.