On 27 January 2016 at 08:36, John R Pierce <pierce at 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'.