[CentOS] NTP Service Running on Local Host does not Sync System Time

[James Hogarth]

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'.