Daniel Augusto Fernandes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I've been using NTP for a long time with success! How does clockspeed
> compare to NTP? Is there any tai time server?
xntpd does two things (well, three, actually). It contacts remote time
servers periodically to correct its notion of time, and it determines the
"natural drift" of your system clock and constantly corrects for it. It
can also provide the time to remote machines that are querying it.
clockspeed separates these different functions. You first take a few
measurements to establish your clock drift, and then you run a daemon that
just adjusts for that known drift and doesn't continue to poll other time
servers and adjust. You can periodically take another measurement and see
if the drift has changed.
Personally, I've looked at the TAI library with interest but I've never
seen a good reason to move away from xntpd for time synchronization. It
works fairly well, I find it convenient to have xntpd take care of
handling changing system clock drift for me (and I have a few machines
that don't have consistent clock drift), and I like being able to use any
convenient server as a server for ntpdate in a pinch. I understand the
xntpd stratum setup and we have a fairly nice setup of multiple stratums
here.
The clockspeed approach has the advantage of working fine for a system
that's only rarely connected to the network, but to me a computer without
network connectivity is almost worthless except for playing games (for
which clock synchronization doesn't really matter).
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
