[olug] Time

[Sean Kelly]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 01:11:26PM -0500, David Sexton wrote:
> Also try singing up for a mailing list to on witch Distro you have some one there might be able to help give more exact commands specific to your Distro.  Not to mention your might get a faster response 

No. See, this is my problem with having 47,000 distributions. Everybody
seems to be under the impression that they are all critically different.
They aren't. They all use the same basic free software. The biggest
difference between them is their custom (dare I say proprietary) tools that
glue the free software together, and where they've set the location of
configuration files.

If you are trying to do NTP and you have an Internet connection, I would
suggest doing two things:

1. Install ntpd, and install an /etc/ntp.conf (likely where Linux
   distributions put it). In that ntp.conf, the most important line is:

   server <some NTP server> prefer

   For more options, see the ntp.conf manpage which should have been
   supplied with your ntpd install.

2. On machine bootup, make sure that `ntpdate` is run before `ntpd` is
   started. ntpdate is a one-shot clock syncing tool which is good to run
   during early stages of startup, to save ntpd the trouble of slowly
   drifting your clock back to a normal time. Your distribution likely has
   its own way of doing this.

I use FreeBSD. I know you don't, but I would do this by putting these lines
in /etc/rc.conf:
   ntpdate_enable="YES"
   ntpdate_flags="<NTP server>"
   ntpd_enable="YES"

-- 
Sean Kelly         | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at zombie.org | http://www.zombie.org