Time sync

Posted June 28, 2004

Steve was telling me how he had setup a time server for keeping all his machines in sync, and I thought it was a good idea too.

We use UWA's time server.

prime:~# cat /etc/crontab

# m h dom mon dow user command
*/15 * * * * root /usr/sbin/ntpdate time.uwa.edu.au | /usr/bin/logger

This should stop prime from advancing a few minutes every month.

5 Comments so far

  1. Hale on June 28th, 2004

    My linux box gains about 15 minutes a day, so I set up the same thing. There is a “systohc” command that synchronises the hardware clock with the system time, you may find that useful too.

  2. Tanman on June 28th, 2004

    I’m currently in the process of configuring a new Debian box. Seeing as the system clock has already sneaked forward three minutes since Firday, it looks like this could be quite useful. I’ll add it to the list.

  3. mlambie on June 28th, 2004

    apt-get install ntpdate

    is what you’re after.

  4. Tanman on June 28th, 2004

    I discovered that moments after my last post. It may even be worth configuring the box to be a local time server for all the other (Windows) machines in the office.

    Either way, there’s a long way to go. Basic Exim configuration is completed, but I want to add SpamAssassin and a possibly few more spam prevention/blocking tools. DNSMasq is up and doing a reasonable job (DHCP config yet to come.) Then there’s Apache, MySQL, Samba (for NT4 domain control), proxy, user/settings migration….

    The list goes on.

  5. mlambie on June 28th, 2004

    I’ve not used Exim before, but Phil (the author) is a cool old dude. He’s a pom, and says root-er instead of route-er. Funny.

    I can show you SA with Sendmail (it’s pretty easy) and have no idea about DNSMasq. I use bind, but you don’t like that. As for Dynamic DNS, I use DHCP to dish out ’static IPs’ based on MAC address and have bind cache a local comowireless.lan zone file which maps lifeline.comowireless.lan to the 192 IP.