how to use ntp in busybox

[Isaac Dunham]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 01:40:29AM +0000, Wei, Catherine wrote:
> Hi:
>      In our system, we're considering if we could use ntp in busybox to 
> replace the ntp supported by ntp.org, which has large footprint, so I'm 
> doing some investigation about ntp in busybox recently but I met some 
> problems. I found that there's only ntpd in busybox, no ntpdate and ntpq.
>      In our current system, we have a ntp wrapper to control ntp 
> behavior based on our requirement. We use ntpdate to sync time when 
> system is started, and we use ntpq to monitor and control the ntpd 
> behavior. For example:
>       1. After ntpdate synced time, use ntpq to enable ntp.
>       2. When we add our own ntp server to the server list, we will use 
> something like this "ntpq -c "keyid id" -c "passwd pwd" -c ":config 
> server 10.172.1.1 minpoll 3 maxpoll 4 burst"
> 
>       I don't know if there's some tools related to ntpq in busybox, so 
> we can remove the current ntp in our system and use ntpd in busybox. 
> Appreciate your quick response, thank you very much.
> 

Busybox ntp does not support any runtime configuration; ntpq corresponds
to unimplemented functionality.

ntpdate is not provided, but equivalent behavior can be obtained with
ntpd -q -p PEER [-p PEER2 ...]

OpenNTPD, from which Busybox ntpd came, provides an "ntpctl" command,
but it's misnamed: it only displays information from ntpd.

You might get further looking at NTPsec.


HTH,
Isaac Dunham