Sandy Drobic wrote:
Bruce Marshall wrote:
People who have more stringent needs for time control than just a desktop would probably want something better. Yes. But given a twice a day update, I can't see that there would be much difference.
The Big Trouble(tm) starts when things happen you do not expect to happen.
This reminds me of one of the problems I ran into when I tried out Ubuntu. My laptop's clock sometimes goes berserk. For some reason, it'll boot up and be a few hours off. Ubuntu uses a system where, by default, the root account has no password and can't be logged into. All systems tasks are done by sudo with the user's own password. Well, at one point, my laptop loaded up with an odd time such that even ntp would just force the change, rather than do it gradually. I think it was like 5 or 6 hours into the future. Anyway, I had done one operation with sudo already before ntp had a chance to update. Once it did, I couldn't use sudo at all, it would return an error about the time. No matter what arguments I sent its way, it simply refused to run. I had a choice of waiting several hours or do the microsoft thing and reboot. So, as a cautionary tale, it's always good to use sudo most of the time, but give the root account a password, you might need to someday.