I'm running Etch amd64 ntp on my home system over dialup ppp. I stopped using chrony because I was having some problems and it couldn't talk to my rtc anyway. Our power can be unreliable and I don't have a UPS. Since ntp doesn't adjust the hwclock, right now the only time it gets updated is at shutdown. What would be the disadvantage of having a cron.hourly script run /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh stop ? Thanks, Doug.