A few minor corrections to account for some implicit but not necessarily universal assumptions: 1. There's no point in activating ntp in Yast if the machine has no network access, since there's nothing to verify the local time against. 2. If network access is available only intermittently, "ntpd -q" (equivalent to ntpdate, but better) should be called from a cron job or when access is available to update the drift file on a one-time basis. 3. After running for several hours and waiting for the drift values to stabilize, ntpd shuts down and revives itself periodically as necessary in order to make further corrections. Kernel support, which Linux provides, is necessary for ntpd to be able to do this. Without such support, it runs continuously. Paul