-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 j debert wrote:
Why do you need ntp?
Synchronising time has been a pain since the early rail services needed to ensure that trains ran on an identifiable schedule, missing your connection or being on one of two trains trying to use same track at the same time would ruin anyone's day. The early British rail companies instigated a common time across their rail networks because local times were so variable and effectively created the first time zone to try and eliminate this cause of such problems. Certain network OSs and services do have operations that tend to be time critical in a similar manner, and use the OS clock rather than the hardware clock (which is just a simple time counter with little additional info) for timestamping operations. The important relative time is then the network time and status, not the local hardware clock time, or even actual local time for that matter. Keeping the OS clock in sync with the network time becomes more important than being in sync with the hardware clock in this case.
Or is it so there is an excuse to neglect the system and CMOS clocks?
To be honest have not bothered much with these in years because except in the initial boot and standalone scenario they are now largely irrelevant in any networked environment. see... http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/quick/clock.html for one take on the clock, and... http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock-2.html for something different
A script to periodically test the network connection and run netdate or rdate when the network is up works just fine. The script can also be run under cron at some suitably long time interval to update system time.
Hmm... isnt this what ntpd does, occasionally check the upstream server and initiate a resync process if things have drifted too far. Using cron is effectively making time synchronisation process dependant on another time related process. It is not a particularly resource intensive daemon anyway.
ntp was created because of the need to keep system clocks accurately synchronised on a network for some time-critical applications. Most people do not need it. Even the author discouraged it's use.
Netdate uses ntp protocols to synchronise with a ntp server. (as does rdate)... so.... see above - -- ============================================================================== I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. Bjarne Stroustrup ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkrsG6sACgkQasN0sSnLmgLwvgCfcwDPxtkP747O3jdlBjpJjrY5 IlcAn0uj48TU9pzWtaBd/nVyRcbmw1Bv =d+NN -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org