[CentOS] NTP and hardware clock

Wed Oct 11 17:20:13 UTC 2006
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, mike.redan at bell.ca wrote:

> This was partially fixed upstream recently:
> https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2006-0393.html
> 
> At least the initscripts will sync the hwclock now out of the box.

That's great, but it seems only for RHEL4, not RHEL3 or RHEL2.1 :(

 
> As for NTPD not starting if it's server is not reachable. Hrm. I haven't
> really seen that happen in my setup. And it is quite often that the NTP
> server is not reachable at startup. Perhaps it is just a change needed
> in ntp.conf? 

Not that I have found. It first tries to do an ntpdate, if that one fails 
it doesn't start ntpd. In my opinion that is not correct behaviour.

The initial ntpdate is to make sure the local time is not totally skewed, 
but if you periodically synchronize the hwclock (which in my opinion ntpd 
should do), then it is not really required.

I'm going to open it as a bug on bugzilla.

Thanks a lot for the reference !

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]