Submitted by ggarron on Sat, 06/27/2009 - 12:05
I have been trying to write something on the blog for a long time, it was a very busy month, and the next one will not be any different, but I can not live without my hobby, and yesterday I run into a weird problem, my two computers showed the time four hours ahead!, I looked for an easy way to sync them and stumbled upon this way.
Openntpd, and from its webpage:
OpenNTPD is a FREE, easy to use implementation of the Network Time Protocol. It provides the ability to sync the local clock to remote NTP servers and can act as NTP server itself, redistributing the local clock.
OpenNTPD is primarily developed by Henning Brauer as part of the OpenBSD Project. The portable version is made by Darren Tucker. The software is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license.
I have installed it now in Arch Linux, Debian and Gentoo, and it worked flawlessly on the three of them.
Installing and running it
For Debian / Ubuntu
sudo aptitude install openntpd
For Gentoo
sudo emerge openntpd
For Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S openntpd
On Arch Linux you should also add the daemon to your /etc/rc.conf file, in the DAEMONS line, and may look like this
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond openntpd)
That will let it working for your basic needs, as is to keep you clock on time.
Now if you want your computer to also be a Time server uncomment the line
listen on *
on the /etc/openntpd/ntpd.conf
To make all your other machines to look at your new Time server just add this line to your /etc/openntpd file
server your.time.server.ip
as your first or only server line your conf. file.
Over just using the ntpd that comes with all linux distros?
Good question, and as far as I know none, just another option..
Here is what I found after googling for "openntpd vs ntpd"
I can speak from experience; read my previous note. It's not all
uncommon for, over a period of weeks, ntp.org's ntpd to drift by a
matter of minutes, not milliseconds. This is the reality of their
daemon: you're either spot-on or you're far off. Never mind their
claims; this is what happens in the real world.
In the real world of OpenNTPD, you might never achieve millisecond
precision, but you'll never ever be more than a tenth of a second off,
either (at absolute worst, and assuming a network connection that's
there at least as much as it's not). From eyeballing things, I'd guess
that I'm usually within a few hundredths of a second. Can you tell the
difference between 21:36:43.33 and 21:36:43.36? Neither can I.
Here is the link: http://openbsd.monkey.org/misc/200408/msg00985.html