ntpdate

[Paul Sladen]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, H. C. Brugmans wrote:
> kahping wrote:
> > i would like an GUI option to disable it, though. i don't like seeing
> > "failed" everytime i boot up Ubuntu :-P

NTP is used to keep a computers Real-Time Clock (RTC) in time with standard
time, even if the clock has drifted, or the computer has suffered a
flat-battery or had the clock moved (eg, booting another Operating System).

One of the reasons the extra service just for Ubuntu Users was setup is
because none of the other NTP time synchronisation services were found to be
stable enough.

Generally they are round-robin systems (collections of lots of computers
where your request gets served by a different server each time).  What was
occasionally happening was that one those machines in the collection would
return an incorrect or wrong answer ---perhaps if its own clock was 'out'.

Abstracting the time-server with a DNS entry meant that
'ntp.ubuntulinux.org' can be pointed at any NTP round-robin network found to
be reliable, or kept on a single reliable machine whilst that still copes
with the load.

Another Operating System Provider made a similar choice and ship config that
talks to 'ntp://time.windows.com' by default.

> I hate being suprized by the ntp timing  out on boot, and I'm  not the 
> world's only user who does not have internet on his pc 24/7. Think of 
> laptops, dial ups etc.

Keybuk (Scott-James) was working on moving items in the boot-process to a
dependency basis.  This avoids DHCP timing out if there's no network cable
plugged-in. ...And avoids NTP timing out unless you have a successful Layer
3 (IP-level) connection up and running.

	-Paul
-- 
I didn't know it snowed here!  London, GB