NTP Clock synchronisation

Hile Tuohela hile at nixu.com
Fri May 27 15:18:22 UTC 2005


Amanda Gillespie wrote:

> I am a complete newbie, just installed Ubuntu 5.04, and I've noticed that 
> when it boots, it fails to connect/sync with the clock at ntp.ubuntu..
> .(blah)...
> 
> Have I not installed something properly? My internet runs off an http proxy, 
> and usually a log-in page appears in my browser before I can surf - could 
> this be the reason its not connecting? (I'm thinking ntp and http are not 
> the same though...)

Yes, if you have to authenticate before you can use internet connection
you can't synchronize with the time server before you have authenticated.

However, if this connection is your regular connection you could check if
the ISP or it's support forums have scripts for linux to do automatic
authentication with the HTTP proxy using your id and password. If you
find such script you can set up it to be run automatically after you get
address (with DHCP, or whatever), so that you don't need to authenticate
anymore and NTP works as well.

Most web-based authentications for net access can be easily automated and
for many implementations there already exist scripts to do it, just put 
your account information to a file required by the script.

Unfortunately, these login systems usually are ISP-specific, so we can 
not easily provide a common system in ubuntu to do it for you... maybe
it would be possible to collect trusted scripts for various ISPs, make
a package and have it possible to select from network configuration 
'yes, I'm customer of ISP n and need to authenticate using their Web
based service, here are my account details.' Of course, they change 
the login systems sometimes, breaking the scripts... but at least we 
could try to do it ;)

    *hile*









More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list