Re: Network Time

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Author: Robert Ambrose
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Re: Network Time

My personal $.02:

When setting up a network to use NTP I designate a box to be the local NTP
server. All the other local devices get their time off the local NTP
server. This box is the only system which gets it time from the Internet.

Whenever passable get your NTP source for the NTP server from your local
ISP. All ISPs will have (or should have) an internal NTP server.

You can try to call the ISP and (usually after a certain amount of pain)
get the name or address of their own NTP server. Good luck if the ISP is
one of the major national ones.

Failing that you can try to find a NTP server by doing a traceroute to an
arbitrary host on the Internet and then guess, based on domain names, a
host name for a NTP server. time.ISP-DOMAIN is often available.

NTP is meant to be hierarchal. The idea is to keep most of the NTP
traffic local and to keep the load off the stratum 1 servers.

The ntpq utility is your main debugging tool. Some (perhaps) useful tips:

1. ntpd will not sync when the time is way out of sync. Use the ntpdate
utility before starting ntpd.

2. It can take a while for ntpd to sync.

3. To see what's going on:
    a) From the ntpq utility, use the 'as' command.  The fields of 
       interest are condition and assID.
    b) If the condition is 'sys.peer', time is being maintained.
    c) If the condition is not 'sys.peer', use 'rv <assID>', where
       <assID> is the value from the assID column.  The main thing I
       look at are the time samples.  ntpd needs at least 4 samples 
       before it will start keeping time.


OTH, rna

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, AZ Pete wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a dev Linux box running Redhat 9 on my home LAN and I noticed that
> the clock has drifted and is now 10 minutes behind.
> Instead of simply resetting it, I'd like this box to sync with a time
> server. I was reading about ntpd, but this seems to be a way to set up a
> machine to be a time server, which is not what I want. It also looks to be
> way more work than I want to get into.
>
> What is the best way to simply sync with a time server once per day. Is
> there a program I can run in a cron job?
>
> Also, what time servers are best to use. The only one listed in my
> ntp.conf is clock.redhat.com. Not that I don't like Redhat, I just would
> like a couple more.
>
> I don't have X running on this box, since I only SSH into it.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Peter
>
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