On 27 January 2016 at 08:36, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
On 1/27/2016 12:25 AM, Traiano Welcome wrote:
I'm tempted to stick an "ntpdate -u ..." in the crontab to force time-synch, but I don't see why that's needed if ntpd service should already be fulfilling that purpose.
ntpd won't make drastic changes in the time, if its too far off. its designed to stabilize the clock by making small changes in speeding it up or slowing it down, and not 'staircase' setting it absolutely.
IMHO, ntpdate -u should be run before starting ntpd so the clock is close to spot on up front, I have sometimes added this to the /etc/init.d/ntp scripts. with systemd, this woudl be trickier to implement, maybe a seperate 'service' thats runs the ntpddate -u and exits, which the ntpd service depends on being run first? I dunno, I haven't really spent the time to grok systemd thoroughly yet.
Or of course reading the man page for ntpd it can be seen that the simplest answer is to use the -g option
http://linux.die.net/man/8/ntpd
This can be added in /etc/sysconfig/ntpd - the appropriate config file for such a thing.
Hacking the init scripts is a terribly fragile thing that will break on the next NTP package update as they are explicitly not marked as config files and will be 'fixed'.