ntp support installation

[Derek Broughton]

NoOp wrote:

> Ubuntu comes with ntpdate as standard, and will run it once at boot time
> to set up your time according to Ubuntu's NTP server. However, a
> server's clock is likely to drift considerably between reboots, so it
> makes sense to correct the time ocassionally. The easiest way to do this
> is to get cron to run it every day. With your favourite editor, create a
> file /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate containing:
> 
That may be a quote, but it seems to be wrong - ntpdate gets automatically
run everytime a network interface comes up on my system.
> 
> ntpdate is a bit of a blunt instrument - it can only adjust the time
> once a day, in one big correction.

Given the number of times my network connection changes, it does much more
than that.

> The ntp daemon ntpd is far more 
> subtle. It calculates the drift of your system clock and continuously
> adjusts it, so there are no large corrections that could lead to
> inconsistent logs for instance. The cost is a little processing power
> and memory, but for a modern server this is negligible.

otoh, for a heavily loaded laptop, it's _far_ from negligible.

-- 
derek