[BBLISA] ntp question

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> I've tried to figure out what those "refid" values mean.  After much
> google'ing I found STEP meant the skew was too large to do increments.

It's funny - if you email anyone in any of the ntp groups and you say
something like "I use ntpdate" they invariably reply, "Why don't you use
ntpd" and they make you feel stupid, because ntpd is so obviously vastly
superior, and any dummy should know that it's much more precise.

My personal experience has been - running ntpd is less reliable.  It is too
often that somehow some system stops syncing time, and you have no way to
know because ntpd is still running.  Until Kerberos breaks and the world
falls apart and users complain.  Then you find out it broke.

Instead, I use cron to schedule ntpdate once per hour on every machine.  It
may be less precise (because the clock is allowed to drift, and only gets
corrected once per hour) but it's a whole lot more reliable.  How far off
does the clock drift over the course of an hour?  Typically, I'd say a
second.  Maybe five seconds if you're really pushing it.  I don't care about
that for any purposes in my infrastructure.  I care about the reliability
more.