I like ddate personally.
Brian, you should code up an adate and submit it to the util-linux people. ;-)
At any rate - I didn't want this e-mail to be completely fluff, so here is some advice.
Non-technical:
Some motherboards have a seriously bad system clock on them. NTP works by slowly skewing the time to keep it in-line with the servers it is feeding from. If your motherboards clock is so bad that NTP believes it can't keep up by tiny skews ... then it will give up and stop working. My recommendation for you in this case is have a nightly cron job that stops ntpd and calls ntpdate and then starts ntpd again. You should schedule the job at a time when it will least effect the system (i.e. without a lot of users or cron jobs dependent on time). In generally doing it on a daily basis prevents the skew from being bad enough for it to cause any real issues doing this. My experience is that even the worst system clocks will take at least a couple of weeks to get so out of wack before ntp will give up.
Technical:
The units of time it works in is called a 'tick' and the actual system call used to slowly augment the time is 'adjtimex'. A smaller unit of time exists as well called a 'jiffie'.
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Jack wrote:
Strange, I never had any problems with ntp when I was running gentoo. Setting it up in debian was a no brainer, and I never have any problems with my time being off by very much. Ntp is a great tool to have, but it's missing one thing: a plug-in for displaying Aztec dates and times.
Brian D.
--- Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Tue, March 22, 2005 4:02 pm, Gerald Combs said:
Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
Ntp doesn't guarantee correct time, it's just
another way to screw it
up.
It _does_ guarantee that you have the same time as
a server or a set of
peers, within a given tolerance. This is helpful
if you want to
correlate log data on different hosts, or run
"make" in an NFS-mounted
directory.
That's if/when it's configured and working correctly. Then it'll even provide the correct date for your email timestamps. That's not necessarily a given though.
I had a system that ... was six hours off after subsequent reboots. Gentoo had, in the absence of useful data from the DHCP server, overwritten the valid ntp config file with default garbage. (This is the default behavior for gentoo.) Caveat admin.
Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
//========================================================\ || D. Hageman [email protected] || \========================================================//