Hi,
> On Wed 04 Apr 2001, Christopher C. Chimelis wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Paul Slootman wrote: > > > > > How about installing ntpdate and configuring /etc/init.d/ntpdate so that > > > it'll get the correct time automatically? :-) > > > > Our firewall blocks it, I believe, so that's no good. I'm going to try to > > It would be enough to have some system in-house that provides > time-of-day and then just use rdate; microsecond accuracy isn't > necessary, as long it's at least in the right month :-) It's also convenient, if you have the correct time. Running 'make' to build larger binaries, that span several NFS mounts can be a hog, if 'make' gets confused on the timestamps of files on the various servers. Silly thing, but guess, how long it took me to....... ;-) > > bring up the "let's start an NTP server in-house" idea to the sysadmin > > again this week... :-) > > Even better of course... One master system behind the firewall that an > be reached by all local systems and that can reach out through the > firewall to sync itself. Can't tell for the US, but I like my little external clock-device receiving the time signal, which is in Germany called DCF-77. I configured NTP to use that device on one system and synchronize the rest of the net to that system. The receiver device - connecting to a parallel port - is well supported in linux and only US-$ 29. Again, this is for germany only, but i assume, other countries have similar cheap offerings. I prefer this over synchronizing to 'external' ( read; internet ) timeservers, since the communication btw the timeserver and your local net can be hacked. However, all of this wouldn't help Chris anyway. ntpd by default will not synchronize to an external clock-source, if the drift between local clock and remote clock suddenly jumps by a few years. ntpd will, in that case reject the external clock source as being valid. Of course, you can configure ntpd to trust the external source more that the system's own clock, but that *really* would open big hacking opportunities to hackers, if you synchronize to internet-space timeservers ;-) Anyway, CONFIG_RTC=y prevented my Alphas from skipping dates, as stated before. If you run anything depending on file-times over network services. i strongly recommend using ntpd and a nifty hardware-clock. Although, I found ntp to be a real STRANGE thing to configure........ Am i off-topic ? yes. But ir's late and all of my beer is empty ;-) Regards, Thomas Weyergraf -- Thomas Weyergraf [EMAIL PROTECTED] My Favorite IA64 Opcode-guess ( see arch/ia64/lib/memset.S ) "br.ret.spnt.few" - got back from getting beer, did not spend a lot.
