VMware ESX 3.5 ntpdate strangeness
We just noticed that the time was very far off on our sparkly new VMware EXS 3.5 server. When I went to run ntpdate to bring it up to sync, I was suprised to find that it could not make a connection to the time server because outbound UDP 123 traffic was blocked by the internal firewall.
Here is what I got:
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -u time.nist.gov
9 Apr 03:47:53 ntpdate[20245]: sendto(192.43.244.18): Operation not permitted
9 Apr 03:47:54 ntpdate[20245]: sendto(192.43.244.18): Operation not permitted
9 Apr 03:47:55 ntpdate[20245]: sendto(192.43.244.18): Operation not permitted
9 Apr 03:47:56 ntpdate[20245]: sendto(192.43.244.18): Operation not permitted
9 Apr 03:47:57 ntpdate[20245]: no server suitable for synchronization found
Normally I would just add a rule to the “/etc/sysconfig/iptables” file to allow traffic out on this port, but Vmware ESX server does not use iptables… It uses its own firewall, so I had to figure out how to change it. Happily, it turns out that there is a handy “esxcfg-firewall” command built just for such things.
Running this:
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall -q | grep 123
12300 1803K valid-tcp-flags tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0
Confirmed that UDP port 123 outbound was disallowed.
Running this opened it up:
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall -e ntpClient
Grep out “123″ again just to be sure:
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall -q | grep 123
1 76 ACCEPT udp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:123
And you can now run ntpdate to sync up the time:
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -u time.nist.gov
9 Apr 09:52:54 ntpdate[20319]: step time server 192.43.244.18 offset 21689.039217 sec
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