* Rick Thomas <rbthomas55@pobox.com> [2006-07-15 01:48]:
Yeah, ntpdate will do the job, and it's a good bit smaller than the
full ntp-simple package.
The alternative you were thinking of *may* be "chrony".
Maybe, although it seems that ntpdate is signiticantly smaller than
chron.
However, keep in mind that NTP, by it's very nature, needs access to
a network time server. The operative word here is "network". If you
don't have access to the global internet, and you don't have an NTP
server on your local network (or you're doing an install without any
network connection at all for some reason) both ntpdate and chrony
will fail. You need to think hard about what you want to do under
those circumstances. Is it acceptable to have the d-i ask for the
address of an NTP server at the same time as it's asking for other
network parameters? For what it's worth, some DHCP servers will
We'd obviously only run NTP if the network is available. It's useful
on e.g. network installations.