Denis Heidtmann wrote:
> My trouble is that I do not know how to specify an ntp server. The
> lists I see look like no internet addresses I am used to seeing. For
> example, the file /etc/default/ntpdate has an entry
> NTPSERVERS="ntp.ubuntu.com". When I google, I get a lot of
> information about servers, how to set one up, etc, but nothing about
> what I actually need to enter for the field <server> to USE the
> server.
As currently specified in /etc/default/ntpdate, ntpdate is slaving to
Ubuntu's own pool of NTP servers at "ntp.ubuntu.com".
I've always used the NTP server pool from NTP.org. It's used by millions
or tens of millions of systems around the world. It's the default "time
server" for most of the major Linux distributions and many networked
appliances. For ntpdate, you could just point to "pool.ntp.org" instead
of Ubuntu's NTP servers
ntpdate is a bit of a blunt instrument as it can only adjust the time
once a day, in one big correction. The ntp daemon ntpd is far more
subtle. It calculates the drift of your system clock and continuously
adjusts it, so there are no large corrections that could lead to
inconsistent logs for instance.
I've always used NTPD w. a drift file configured with a list of NTP
servers from NTP.org like so:
driftfile /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
server 0.pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org
server 3.pool.ntp.org
The 0, 1 and 2.pool.ntp.org names point to a random set of servers that
will change every hour.
Start ntpd, and after some time (this could take as long as half an
hour!), ntpq -pn should output something like:
mc-goose:~$ ntpq -p
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
+81.6.42.224 193.5.216.14 2 u 68 1024 377 158.995 51.220 50.287
*217.162.232.173 130.149.17.8 2 u 191 1024 176 79.245 3.589 27.454
-129.132.57.95 131.188.3.222 3 u 766 1024 377 22.302 -2.928 0.5
-Mike
.
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