[TriLUG] How to get ntpd to work

[Matt Pusateri]

On Mon, March 21, 2005 3:41 pm, Greg Cox said:
>> I always heard you want to pull time from one stratum 1 and
>> two stratum two servers.
>
> Be a good citizen, use lower stratums for home/general use.
>
> Asking an S1 for time instead of a lower stratum is like asking the
> UNIX SA to change an email password instead of the helpdesk.  It'll
> do it, but it's not a good use of its.. well, time.  One or two people
> doing it may be ok.   Everyone; no.
>
> If you REALLY have a need for the level of precision that an S1
> affords
> over an S2 and lower, you'd know it, but even then I'd wonder why you
> were risking network problems and not running an independent internal
> time source.  If you insist on using S1s, do it smartly: for a large
> $WORK setup, have your ntp[1 .. n ~ 3] boxes be S2's, fed by different
> S1's, and have your main servers use the internal S2's as their
> masters.
>
>> But is definitely a better idea to pull time from multiple servers.
>
> Yeah.


Good point, Greg, I wasn't thinking about his problem possibly being
for home use, and thus I should have been more specific on the S1 & S2
advice.  Alot of people don't bother setting up ntpd unless they are
provisioning for a business network.  Most just run ntpdate, which is
supposedly depracated. So running ntpd -q would be to to correct
replacement for ntpdate.

FYI, for those NTP newbies, the SUN blueprint docs here are a good read.

http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Main/DocumentationIndex

Matt