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Placing ntpdate into cron seems to be no longer a good idea.

What is an

  • easy
  • state-of-the-art
  • automatic
  • environmental friendly ;-)
  • sleek

way of keeping a (debian) server's time clock up to date?

powtac
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2 Answers2

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apt-get install ntp. If you've never had it installed before, you should be good to go. If you have, and therefore, might have stale config files, you could apt-get remove --purge ntp and apt-get install ntp again to get new config files. Or if you want to keep your config files, I recommend checking that /etc/default/ntp has NTPD_OPTS='-g'. This says to ntpd "try to correct the time, even if it is way off", and make sure at least one good server in /etc/ntp.conf has the iburst option, like:

server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst

This allows a burst of packets to be sent which will get your time synced quicker.

If you ever need to have something wait for time sync before proceeding, run ntp-wait. If, for example, you have a service which shouldn't start until you are sure you have your time corrected. (which you previously might have used ntpdate for)

stew
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  • Installing `ntp` is enough? No further configuration work required? That's it? No `ntpdate`? – powtac Feb 14 '12 at 21:57
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    that's it. then you can run `ntpq -p` at any time to see how well it thinks it is doing. – stew Feb 14 '12 at 22:00
  • What I did now: `apt-get remove --purge ntpdate` `apt-get remove --purge ntp` `apt-get install ntp`. – powtac Feb 15 '12 at 00:23
3

Couldn't you just set ntpd to start at boot as suggested on the mailing list? That's what I've been doing for as long as I can remember.

Michael Pobega
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