On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 12:05:58PM -0500, Boris Goldberg wrote:
| The ntpd from OBSD is raw and lame yet. It takes days (!) to really
| synchronize, adjusting time and clock frequency back and forth (even if you
| start with -s) so it's too early to say that using it is "right". It will
| be "right" after it matures, gets more useful synchronization algorithm and
| it's own ntpdate (or a parameter to synchronize and exit).
Without -s, you are right. Adjusting time will take a long time if
your clock is off by a large margin. Luckily, OpenNTPD starts if that
is the case, unlike some other ntp daemon. The adjusting of time and
clock frequency is to be somewhat expected with todays low quality
clockchips on peecee motherboards. However, I've found my clocks to
sync up pretty fast, no problems there as far as I can see.
And we dont need 'ntpdate'. Why would you synchronize and exit ? An
important thing about timekeeping is to provide monotonuously
incrementing time, making sure not to skip timepoints and even more
importantly, not to jump back in time. If there is a large adjustment
to be made, ntpd has -s which will sync it at boot (before other, time
sensitive, programs are run). This is the most important argument
against running rdate from a cron. And if you really, really need the
sync-and-exit behaviour of ntpdate, run rdate, it has the -n switch.
I think the synchronization algorithm in ntpd is pretty good as it is.
All my machines are in sync, they all agree on the same time when I
compare it. This is within second boundaries, yes. It has been said
before that if you need picosecond precision, then perhaps OpenNTPD is
maybe not for you (although I believe that using one of the newer time
sensors available in OpenBSD can bring pretty accurate time to your
machine too).
