🚀 go-pugleaf

Ken Yap (ken@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU) wrote:
: |I tried to set the time with netdate off a Sun BTW.
: |
: |Is there any way to rid Linux's dependency on the BIOS clock 
: |for setting the time?  

: I use xntpd which comes with ntpdate for setting the time from an
: accurate server on the Net. I don't know about netdate but certainly
: ntpdate hasn't got any problems with DST as it works in GMT.

xntpd is a better solution than netdate. It is much more robust, and seems
to have less hassles talking to most hosts. I have found that netdate
works OK talking to some hosts, but breaks badly on others. You also have
to run netdate as a cron job to keep accurate time, whereas xntpd is a
daemon.

Note that both of these by default will not change the clock if it is too
different, because they assume that the remote site is wrong. This can be
overidden, but the bottom line is it is still a good idea to have a fairly
accurate CMOS clock. 

: Normally the CMOS clock is consulted at boot up only so you need to
: write the time back to CMOS after correcting it. If it's only a few
: days between logins, I find the CMOS clock doesn't drift more than a
: few seconds and this is good enough for me.

I have found the CMOS clock hardly drifts at all, but the system clock
drifts by about 1 sec per hour! This means that even if you don't have a
net connection, it would pay to read the CMOS every hour from a cron job.

: As someone else pointed out, if you only have Linux, use GMT for the
: CMOS clock.  If you must run DOG, you need to use local time but you
: will have more hassles with DST corrections.

You dont actually have to use local time for DOG. I have seen a device
driver for DOG that lets you use GMT and supports timezones. It was on the
infomagic disk that had debian 1.1 (Sept 96). I haven't actually tried it,
but I probably will soon.

ABO