From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3 Description of problem: ntpd produces the following error in /var/log/messages: can't open /etc/ntp/drift.TEMP: Permission denied The default /etc/sysconfig/ntpd config runs ntpd as the ntp user, which is fine. However, the ntpd user cannot write to /etc/ntp by default, so ntpd is unable to create the drift file. The solution is to change the permissions on /etc/ntp to ntp:root and chmod 775. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.1.2-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Enable ntpd 2. See error about drift.TEMP in syslog 3. Expected Results: No error messages. Additional info:
The manual says the drift file should be in /var/lib/ntp, which is owned by ntp.ntp mode 755. Perhaps a line like driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift is required in /etc/ntp.conf
To comment #1 Thanks . ntp.conf: # # Drift file. Put this in a directory which the daemon can write to. # No symbolic links allowed, either, since the daemon updates the file # by creating a temporary in the same directory and then rename()'ing # it to the file. # driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift broadcastdelay 0.008