[PLUG] ntpd

[Bill Spears]

On Fri, 2003-02-14 at 04:24, Anthony Schlemmer wrote:
> With NTP 4.x I think an NTP server will initially start polling about 
> every 64 seconds and as things stabilize it starts increasing the 
> number of seconds between polls until it gets to a maximum of polling a 
> server ever 1024 seconds. 
> 
> Before you startup an NTP server make sure you system time is set 
> reasonable well. This is normally done using "ntpdate -b <ntp-server>" 
> to force the system time to be set rather than slewing it. You might 
> also want to be sure that you write the contents of the system clock to 
> the hardware clock as part of the shutdown process so the system time 
> will be set fairly reasonably when the system is booted. 
> 
> If you don't update the hardware clock on shutdown you can also do this 
> via a cron job at some reasonable interval. I noticed the hardware 
> clock on my workstation was way off after I went many months without a 
> reboot as NTP was only keeping the kernel's system time updated and did 
> nothing with the hardware clock.
> 
> Tony
>  
> On Wednesday 12 February 2003 19:21 pm, Bill Spears wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-02-14 at 02:53, AthlonRob wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 10:46, Bill Spears wrote:
> > > > I've got some sort of conflict between ntpd and my local
> > > > time/clock setup. ntpd is setting my local time to about 16 hours
> > > > ahead. FYI: RH 8.0.
> > >
> > > Is your timezone set up properly?
> > >
> > > Rob
> >
> > Probably not. BTW, what is the default for how often ntpd checks the
> > time?
> >

Well, I don't know what to say, but it's been _interesting_.  My problem
had something to do with rebooting. Everytime I did I would get a 16
hour (note we're in GMT-8) difference between hwclock -r and date. I
could then use date --set "-16 hours" to correct date, but the moment I
rebooted, the same 16 hour difference occurred. Finally chkconfig'ed
ntpd out and rebooted and it solved the problem, at least this time.