Time Updates

[Larry Hartman]

On Wednesday 10 September 2008 01:01:03 pm Derek Broughton wrote:
> John Hubbard wrote:
> > I read the man page for ntpd and it looks like ntpd can either be a
> > daemon that wakes itself up on interval and updates the time in your
> > machine or actually broadcasts time to other machines. In the man page
> > it notes that with the '-q' option it mimics the behavior of ntpdate,
> > "which is to be retired".
>
> istr it's said that for years.  I'll believe it when it happens.
>
> > I then poked around at /etc/ntp.conf and it looks like the default is to
> > just listen. There was a line commented out about broadcast.
> > Am I correct in believing that the default for ntpd is to just update my
> > time on a regular interval and not broadcast the time to the network?
>
> it should be - I just hate the idea of installing a program that with one
> small change by a user who doesn't know what he's doing, is going to start
> broadcasting to the network.
> --
> derek

~$ grep ntpd /var/log/syslog*
/var/log/syslog:Sep 10 18:36:22 Joseph ntpdate[8335]: ntpdate 4.2.4p4 at 1.1520-o 
Fri Mar  7 20:24:08 UTC 2008 (1)
/var/log/syslog:Sep 10 18:36:25 Joseph ntpdate[8335]: step time server 
69.36.240.252 offset 42.538743 sec

Just on a whim I retried the grep command offered earlier.  Judging by this I 
am assuming that my ntpdate is now working?  Mysterious indeed....  The only 
thing I did that could have had any affect on this is the sudo ntpdate-debian 
command.

I won't say it is solved until I've restarted a couple more times and grepped 
ntpd to see how consistant it is.

Larry