-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Friday 2005-12-16 at 18:26 -0500, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
I just discovered, thanks to an article by Carlos Robinson, that ntpd was not being started at boot time but that I could fix it by going into the runlevel editor within Yast. I don't understand why the default is to not run ntpd.
Because only you knows if you have a permanent network connection.
In any event, I've turned it on now, so I'll see if my clock keeps better time.
But that still leaves the following question. If ntpd relies only on the drift file to keep the system clock accurate, sooner or later the system clock will wander.
No, no, no. The ntp daemon relies on external (intranet or internet) servers running ntpd, and these servers having each access to a very reliable time reference, be it another more reliable server, or a gps receiver or atomic clock (these are stratum 1 servers). The daemon will keep its own drift files.
Supposedly if ntpd is running, the drift value is updated on halt. But what if the machine is never turned off? Is there some way to get ntpd to consult its collection of timeservers periodically and/or update the drift value?
You are getting confused. The value updated when halting is not the system clock drift, but the cmos clock (aka hardware clock) drift. This clock runs from a battery while the computer is powered off, and a calculated drift or error value, multiplied by the hours off, is used to correct the time when powering up again, and then set upt once the system (kernel) clock. These adjustements do not have anything to do with ntpd (kind of). You really must read the docs again, carefully. My writeup tried to clarify these issues, perhaps I failed. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDo2QltTMYHG2NR9URAsvdAJ0cFcqpDEMF0gUJVRnYtCiYCfznQwCfdu1g GVBHyjOt3pFJr0ad3DzR95E= =Pdgw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----