== sntpq: a SNTP query program SNTP is the basic version of NTP that pretty much every NTP server responds to, even if they don't respond to queries from the venerable 'ntpq' program. There are many SNTP clients that will set your system's time from one or more (S)NTP servers, but very few programs that will send a SNTP query to a (S)NTP server and tell you what it responds with. This is such a query program. A SNTP query cannot tell you a NTP server's list of peers and time sources, but it can report the server's current synchronization peer and various basic information. A typical example: ; sntpq ns3.switch.ca ns3.switch.ca: Stratum: 3 Time Source: 206.108.0.134 ntp4.torix.ca (ce6c0086) Time at xmit: 2018-12-19 19:40:10.247662067 +0000 UTC RTT: 64.352066ms Precision: 119ns MinError: 0s Clock updated: 2018-12-19 19:32:49.043288485 +0000 UTC Root delay: 36.102294ms Root dispersion: 500.656127ms local root distance: 550.883307ms (via this server) local adjustment: -1.971151ms (based on this server's time) Interpreting many of these fields requires knowing something about NTP, which is out of scope for this README. Note that the 'Time Source' field only works for IPv4 time sources, because NTP transmits this information in a 32-bit field and there is no way to fully encode an IPv6 address into 32 bits. Chris Siebenmann doesn't know what shows up in this field for IPv6 time sources, so sntpq right now will try to treat them as IPv4 addresses which will probably not work very well. sntpq has a convenient '-f' option that will follow the chain of time sources until they run out (or you hit a time source that you can't query). You can do this by hand, but -f takes the tedium out of it. - Chris Siebenmann, December 19 2018