FS#3339 - ntpdate must be called somewhere on boot to get ntpd in the ballpark

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Luke Hoersten (lhoerste) - Sunday, 16 October 2005, 00:18 GMT
Last edited by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Monday, 17 October 2005, 05:42 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Current
Status Closed
Assigned To dorphell (dorphell)
Architecture not specified
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7 Wombat
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

If the clock is too far off, ntpd will not be able to update it. Most distro's have a separate init script called "ntp-client" or something that just calls ntpdate first to get the time close so that ntpd can keep it synced.
This task depends upon

Closed by  dorphell (dorphell)
Friday, 02 December 2005, 22:31 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Comment by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Sunday, 16 October 2005, 20:40 GMT
you can add ntpdate to rc.local in /etc/
then it's called on every startup.
greetings
tpowa
Comment by Luke Hoersten (lhoerste) - Sunday, 16 October 2005, 22:04 GMT
That defeats the purpose of having a script start ntpd then. Why not just start all my daemons from /etc/rc.local then?
Comment by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Monday, 17 October 2005, 05:41 GMT
no, ntpd is used for keeping everything in sync, think of pc's that have a external clock, they don't need the ntpdate stuff.
if you need ntpdate then feel free to add it to rc.local, as it's described in the ntp wiki.
greetings
tpowa
Comment by Dale Blount (dale) - Friday, 18 November 2005, 14:17 GMT
I agree, the ntp script should call something like:

ntpdate `egrep ^server /etc/ntp.conf | awk '{print $2}'`


before ntpd is started.

rc.local is called after the ntpd daemon starts from DAEMONS() and therefore would do no good.
Comment by dorphell (dorphell) - Friday, 02 December 2005, 22:31 GMT
The thing is... ntpdate should only run when your clock is totally out of whack, hours off which on a working clock only happens the first time you use it or after not using it for years so I think it's upto the system administrator to tend to. I don't want to put it in the ntpd rc script. If your clock is off by a noticeable amount when you boot up (more than 1 second) use the iburst in /etc/ntp.conf to sync right away on start of ntpd instead of gradually fixing it.

e.g.:
server ntp1.server.net iburst
server ntp2.server.net iburst

Closing...

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