Re: setting hardware clock from NIST

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

> From: David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>

> brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown) writes:
> 
> > I have an executable script, "time.rc" which has: 
> >
> >   #! /bin/bash
> >   rdate -s time-b.nist.gov 
> >   clock -w
> 
> It's almost certainly better to find a local time server and not
> hammer on the NIST's; I'd also use ntp (ntp-simple package) to keep
> your clock up-to-date while the system is running.  

Yes, quite something. It's been years since I've looked into this, and
it is now much more established. For one thing, if I recall correctly,
there were only 2-3 servers. Following your recommendation, I got the
address of a local time server and also installed ntp-simple.

> That setup is probably fine, though I'd do either a cron script or an
> init.d script, not both (if your machine spends a lot of time shut
> down, anacron can run delayed cron jobs at boot time).  If you do want
> an init script, I'd also make it more policy-compliant; try working
> from /etc/init.d/skeleton.

Thanks for the advice. I normally don't reboot for months at a time,
and so need to sync clocks with cron. I'll kill the symlink in
/etc/rc2.d. I assume that /usr/sbin/ntpd is the executable that I
should symlink in /etc/cron.daily.

In reading the doc, I see that ntpq, run without argument, is a way to
do a simple test of ntp functionality. However, that does not seem to
be part of the ntp-simple package, nor is it itself a package. Have
you used ntpq, and if so, how?

Haines