Mailing List Archive

A public daemon would be best, I think.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> The server has some mad clock drift; it's currently about 4 minutes slow
> compared to official time as reported by www.time.gov. The hardware
> clock is actually only about one minute off -- the other three minutes
> of drift have apparently accumulated over less than ten days of uptime!
>
> Is there a more or less authoritative time server in or about Bomis-land
> to sync with, or should I go looking for a public Network Time Daemon
> server?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Friday 14 February 2003 12:39, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> A public daemon would be best, I think.

There's a list at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/servers.html, and if
you cast chrony, you'll get all the ones that I found had addresses when I
wrote the spell.

phma

Just a thought: in the past, I have always had good results from using
'rdate' on a chron. If you set the clock once a day, it never varies
by more than a second or two, which is very much close enough for our
purposes.

Real ntp software is amazing, but really overkill for our purposes?

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Just a thought: in the past, I have always had good results from using
>'rdate' on a chron. If you set the clock once a day, it never varies
>by more than a second or two, which is very much close enough for our
>purposes.
>
>Real ntp software is amazing, but really overkill for our purposes?
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l@wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>
>
I don't think it's overkill, given NTP's ease of use. Points in favour:
* Most Linux distributions include NTP
* It only requires one small config file to be set up and then runs
unobtrusively ever after.
* It's significantly more accurate and reliable than ad-hoc timing
solutions, and
* It's resistant to errors in the up-stream time servers, using a voting
algorithm to resist bogus time settings
* It won't step the clock backwards, which can be a pain for databases
and backups

I'd be glad to help you with the setup, if you want.

Neil