Major Clock Drift

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:57:51 +0000
dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 03:47:17PM -0400, Josh Pollak wrote:
> > 
> > On Aug 26, 2004, at 3:40 PM, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> > >>Anyway, what could be the cause of my drifting clock? Could I have
> > >>something setup wrong, or is my computer's hardware somehow going?
> > >
> > >Run your ntpdate at boot time, then run ntpd forever after.
> > 
> > Isn't ntpd the ntp server? I don't want my workstation being an ntp 
> > server all the time... Maybe I'm confused about how ntpd works.
> 
> You're confused about how ntpd works.
> 
> ntpdate is a trivial ntp implementation: it gets one reading,
> then exits. 
> 
> ntpd is a long-running daemon. It synchronizes with several
> other ntpd-running machines, and keeps them all together. More
> attention is paid to machines with a lower stratum number: a
> stratum-1 machine is presumed to have "real" knowledge of the
> time through GPS or an atomic clock or a radio clock. 
> 
> "being an ntp server" as you think of it is controlled by the
> acls in the ntpd.conf. Set it up so that it doesn't allow random
> IPs to connect, and you're fine.
Just to add to this a bit. 
In many systems, ntpdate is run at boot time (or more precisely when
transitioning to multi-user mode).

The ntpd (or xntpd) daemon can be used as both a server or as a client,
but mostly as a client. It polls the server periodically based on
/etc/ntp.conf. The cost of running ntpd is very low since it runs an
update maybe once every 10 minutes. 


However, it also appears that either your system clock is messed up or
the kernel is not keeping time correctly. I've seen issues like this on
the SuSE list. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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