Fred (2018-08-09):
Someone complained off list about the timestamp in my emails being off.
Being a hardware person I think hardware should work properly and clocks
should keep accurate time. So I installed ntpdate as suggested but it is
not active yet.
Nowadays, unless you have religions objections, you should just enable
systemd-timesyncd, it is the most lightweight and transparent way of
enabling network time synchronization with nowadays Debian.
ntpdate is not really good because it only does punctual queries; ntpd
and timesyncd will keep stats and adjust more accurately.
If I ask google what time it is in Mesa AZ. the response agrees closely with
an "atomic" clock I have. The computer clock is about 10 min. fast.
fred@ragnok:~$ /usr/sbin/ntpdate -q time.nist.gov
server 2610:20:6f96:96::4, stratum 1, offset -610.512368, delay 0.09421
server 132.163.96.4, stratum 1, offset -610.509394, delay 0.08899
9 Aug 06:51:15 ntpdate[13672]: step time server 132.163.96.4
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
offset -610.509394 sec
fred@ragnok:~$ date
Thu Aug 9 06:51:18 MST 2018
The time server is quite close to the computer clock.
If you are looking at the time I underlined above, I am pretty sure
(looking at the source) that it is the local time, not the time returned
by the server.
Regards,