What units does the ntp drift file use?

Posted by arielf on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by arielf
Published on 2013-05-21T00:19:27Z Indexed on 2013/06/27 16:29 UTC
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time

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clock

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ntp

When the ntpd daemon is running, the file: /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift gets updated periodically. Example:

17:20 hostname 118 ~> ls -l /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
-rw-r--r-- 1 ntp ntp 7 May 20 16:46 /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
# So it looks like it was last updated ~34 minutes ago

The file has one number in it, for example, looking at a 4 virtual hosts, I find these values, respectively:

-22.086
-10.214
-13.669
6.045

I assume these are seconds per day(?), but not sure. man ntpd mentions a different drift file /etc/ntp.drift which doesn't seem to exist. The man page doesn't explain what units are being used for the drift.

Questions:

Is /etc/ntp.drift actually /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift on Ubuntu?
What units is the drift expressed in?

Thanks!

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