Sync to time server

on my redhat7 box, I use cron daily to sync the time. I did it an ugly way, so there will probably be better answers for you which will use NTP's full functionality.

I created a Cron Hourly job, which connects to a NTP server every hour, and corrects the time on my server. It's quick, it's easy. It works great. As indicated, there are probably better ways.

I created a file with the following 2 lines.

/usr/sbin/ntpupdate -b timelord.uregina.ca
/sbin/clock -w

The first line connects to a server which is fairly close to me (physically). and resets the time in the OS's system clock. The second line pushes the system clock time out to the BIOS.

I copied mine into /etc/cron.hourly and this causes it to run (obviously) everyhour. You'll want to copy yours to /etc/cron.daily, to have it run daily.

Try the first line (using a NTP source close to you) at the command line first. I found that several didn't succeed when I actually tried them.

My Windows 2000/Wintendo boxes all synchronize to that using the NET TIME command.

Kev.

I use a program called xntpd (you can find it on RedHat v6.2 or earlier distribution but not on v7.0) and it works fine behind a firewall as long as the firewall is configured to permit the packets.

The machine running xntpd also serves as a timesource to the rest of my network and it works very nicely for that as well.

paul