On Friday 16 December 2005 6:10 pm, Carl Hartung wrote:
On Friday 16 December 2005 16:06, Jeff Dierking wrote:
My clock drifts. I haven't anylyzed my drift file since I put that in the last time a few weeks ago, but as all my machines get thier time from this box and the only other time it syncs is at boot, which happens rarely, I opted for a more pro-acive approach.
My experience has always been along the same lines as Jerry's and Ken's on this one... set and forget... I usually use YaST and don't experience any problems.
How much drift are you seeing, over what time frame and how did you first become aware of it?
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. 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. 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? Paul