How to allow normal users to adjust date and time?

Tim Frost timfrost at xtra.co.nz
Sat Jan 14 08:21:18 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 22:41 +0000, Neil Woolford wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 20:25 +0000, Toby Kelsey wrote:
> > neil woolford wrote:
> > > I'd like to be able to allow (selected) normal users to set the time and
> > > date of their systems, using the gui interface
> > > 
> > > By default this is only accessible by users with administrative
> > > privileges, I don't want to give all these privileges to normal users
> > > just so that they can adjust and synchronise the time on their machines.
> > 
> > try 'man sudoers'.
> 
> Thanks, I'm just having a look at that rather long document.  The
> principle isn't so hard, but the detail, oh the detail...
> 
> > You could instead run ntpd to synchronise the clocks automatically.
> 
> Which works very well on my machine, but doesn't seem to want to play on
> the target machine :(
> 
> First (understood) part of the problem being an ISP provided USB modem
> (Speedtouch) which works fine but doesn't come up in time to sync the
> clock during the boot sequence (ntpdate): 

Try adding a sleep command to the init script for ntpdate (before the
call to ntpdate).  This will slow the boot, but will give the modem tme
to initialize.

>  second part (mysterious)
> being that the system doesn't seem to talk to the ntp server(s), ntpq -p
> doesn't give any result except for the local clock...
> 
> So the poor user is at the mercy of clock drift, and as he likes to
> place his eBay bids very late, it is a problem.
> 
> Neil





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