NTP server address from DHCP client not working

RouterOS General
1

Hi -

I have a new RB750GL, just upgraded to ROS 5.23, ntp package installed.
DHCP client is enabled and has “Use Peer NTP” (and “Use Peer DNS”) enabled, which I believe means that it should take its NTP server address from the 750’s DHCP client, assuming the client gets one from the external server on the gateway port. Indeed the address given by the external gateway server is shown in the DHCP client settings, so that seems to be working fine. However, that address is not picked up by the NTP client, which is set to unicast mode. I can set the server address manually and that works fine, meaning the device syncs its time-of-day clock to that server. But it never shows any dynamic server. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood how this should work, but from what I’ve read, I was expecting the DHCP-supplied address to override the statically-set one.

(As an aside, I’m a little puzzled as to why setting a static server address for the client is a hard requirement in unicast mode. Not surprising that setting no server would result in no time sync of course, but might that not be okay, temporarily, if one was intending it to be overridden by an address from DHCP?)

Google found me a report of something from several years ago that sounds similar, and the response was that it would be fixed in the next release. I’m guessing the lack of later mentions of this means i’m doing something stupid.

Thanks!

2

This evening I disconnected the router for a while because I had to move it. When I had time to work on it again, it had been powered up for a couple hours … and now the NTP client does show a dynamic server from DHCP. Now I can even change or remove the static address, and the dynamic one is used, as I had originally expected. In my earlier testing (before my original post), I had tried rebooting several times with no change in behaviour, and I’ve made no other config changes in the mean time. So I’m happy that it’s working now, but I’m at a loss to explain what happened here. In fact I vaguely remember seeing something like this when I set up my first two RBs (750 and 450), a year or two ago. Has anyone else seen this?