[Discuss] adventures in dns

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 10/30/2012 07:34 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
>> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Gillen
>>
>> I messed around with 'date -s' trying to set the system clock, but gave up
>> figuring out how to specify the format correctly (I have used it in the
>
> When you "man date" it looks pretty straightforward to me:
> /usr/bin/date [-u] [ [mmdd] HHMM |  mmddHHMM [cc] yy]  [.SS]
> Just start typing numbers, in that order
> 	date 103007322012
> (It's 10/30 07:32, 2012 right now.)

That's really intuitive: having the time in between the day and the 
year... it's like bash programming: I can do it if I have to, but the 
fact that I always have to look it up (because it's so obtuse) means I 
just avoid it when possible.

> Also, this has been my standard NTP server for a few years.  If anyone gets it right, it's got to be them.
> 	north-america.pool.ntp.org
> I would find it *extremely* shocking if they screwed up their DNS in such a way that it wouldn't resolve if you had the wrong date on your computer.  That's the POINT of their DNS.

It wasn't that any one group's DNS was messed up, it was that my server 
wouldn't authenticate *any* responses (no matter the domain).

> Even if your date is wrong, you can always ask someone else to look it up for you explicitly
> 	nslookup north-america.pool.ntp.org 8.8.8.8
> This way, you're completely bypassing your local resolver and going directly to 8.8.8.8 to ask them to resolve it
>
> And finally, for a one-time-bam set your clock, just run the ntpdate command.
> 	ntpdate north-america.pool.ntp.org
> (This one does rely on your local resolver, so you might have to do the nslookup command first, and then type in the IP address.)

Right, that's basically what I ended up doing; a temp entry in 
resolv.conf (filling the job of nslookup) followed by ntpdate.

Matt