Harlan, The ntpdate program was first written by Mike Petrie and Louie Mamakos circa 1984 and so far as I know has not been maintained since. I purposely built ntpdate functionality in ntpd some years ago, but that has not been popular, probably because that requires a configuration file. Properly configured, the time is set within 13 seconds using the engineered mitigation and discipline algorithms that ntpdate does not have.
Continued maintenance of ntpdate is not a worthwhile expense; rather, those resouces should be put into a command line argument for ntpd that could specify one or more servers without requiring a configuration file. In this way users would not even know that ntpd was any different than ntpdate. That might even be done with a script. There is precedent in this agenda. We did in fact replace the ntptrace program with a script. Dave Harlan Stenn wrote: >ntpdate is broken in many ways, nobody wanted to fix it, and in the interim >we came up with sntp. > >I agree that ntpd -g is usually better than sntp (or ntpdate) to initially >set the time, but the choice is between "Set the clock well, even if it >takes a little time" and "Set the clock as quickly as possible and it may be >wrong." > > _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
