[NBLUG/talk] Re: time servers

E Frank Ball frankb at efball.com
Sun May 23 14:55:08 PDT 2004


On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 12:48:58PM -0700, William Tracy wrote:
}
} Another, unrelated question: My system clock keeps
} getting set to weird times (possibly a defective clock
} chip on the motherboard? I have no idea). I could have
} sworn that there was a Linux utility that lets you
} sync the system clock over the net, but now I can't
} find it. Any ideas?

If your machine is usually on and connected to a network
then use "ntp" (network time protocol).  The package is ntp
or ntpd depending on distribution.  Edit /etc/ntp.conf to
add some clocks (2 or 3 is a reasonable number).

There is a project to offer lots of public ntp servers:
http://www.pool.ntp.org/ You can just put a couple of:
"server us.pool.ntp.org" lines in /etc/ntp.conf and when ntp
starts you get a couple of randomly selected servers from
the pool in the US.

Since your probably local to Sonoma County you can get
better performance with local servers:  The nblug server is
a public ntp server:  ntp.nblug.org.  My server is also a
public ntp server:  ntp.frizzen.net.  These are both in the
us.pool.ntp.org pool of servers.  If your a sonic customer
they have a server:  time.sonic.net.  These three all
synchronize to different time standards.

time.sonic.net is stratum 2, the other two are usually at
stratum 2, but sometimes drop to stratum 3.  If you don't
know what that means don't sweat it.  Just use'm and be
happy or RTFM.

Use rdate or ntpdate to set the time at boot up.  Then ntp
will keep it accurate within milliseconds while running.
Most systems will reset the hardware clock at system
shutdown automatically.

ntp runs on port 123/udp.  rdate uses port 37/tcp.

--

   E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com





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