I am troubleshooting a latency network issue on a network. It is probably a nic or cabling issue, but while I was going through the process of figuring it out, I was looking at the timings of a ping packet leaving a network card and arriving at another server. Both linux.

So I have tcpdump running on both, and I issue a ping from one to the other, and back again, and looking at the timing differences might have shed light on where the latency is coming from.

It is an academic exercise now, as I need to eliminate some more fundamental causes, but I was curious as to how this could be achieved. Given that ntpd is installed and running on two servers, how can I confirm the current time discrepency between the two servers, to whatever level of accuracy is possible - given that we are talking about latency on a local lan, which is ideally a millisecond or so.

NTP itself is accurate to a couple of ms under good conditions, and as both servers are in the same environment, they should (presumably) achieve a similar level of accuracy, and so should have a time discrepency between them of a only few ms - but how can I check this?