[OT] NTP servers - was Re: Kernel clock issue "Clocksource tsc unstable"

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 23:22 -0500, Rashkae wrote:

> 
> Unless you're doing something that's extremely time sensitive (such as
> synchronizing to those time based RSA security tokens) I don't really
> see the point to synchronizing with ntp at all.   Any functioning clock
> should be able to keep track of wall time within a few seconds accuracy
> per month.

NTP synchronization is more important than you might realize. Weird
things can happen unless you keep the clocks synced between systems.  If
you use NFS in your home network, you need to keep the systems in sync
or otherwise file update times can get out of wack which impacts
programs like make and rsync which depend on accurate file timestamps.
Also without time synchronization, log entries timestamp can be
inaccurate.  Authentication systems like Kerberos depend on time
synchronization between systems as well.

All of these reasons may not be as critical for a home system or a
single desktop, but setting up NTP to use the pool.ntp.org servers is
easy and NTP requires few resources.

My own Internet facing server joined the pool.ntp.org system.  If you
have a server which is on the net 24x7 and has reasonable bandwidth (1
mbs) I would urge you to join the pool.  For more info on either joining
or using the pool see http://www.pool.ntp.org/ 
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005