On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 09:36:33AM -0700, Fred wrote:
I think you may be right. It seems a stupid response from ntpdate since I asked the time from the server. So, ntpdate maybe isn't what I should be using.
ntpdate isn't a tool to tell you the time, it's a tool to establish the offset between your clock and a remote clock. The timestamp that appears is just a log entry. If you want to use ntpdate you can put it in a cron job that gets called once per day or whatever. You may want to add the -s option so the log goes to syslog instead of stdout. This will work fine.
There was a discussion about time services on this list some time ago and at that time I decided chrony should be used so I will try it next. I don't want a service that keeps banging on the server. Once a day seems reasonable to me. Can chrony be configured to check in once a day. I don't expect the time to be more accurate than 30 seconds. The computer does run 24/7 so the drift is in the software.
chrony is also probably overkill for you. I'd suggest openntpd or systemd-timesyncd. They'll check more than once per day, but it's really not much traffic or a big deal. Or you can just stick with ntpdate.
Mike Stone
