On Thu, May 20, 2004, C. Jon Larsen wrote:
On Thu, 20 May 2004, Jared Mauch wrote:
I've found it useful on older machines (PCs with cheap clocks and oscilators) to cron ntpdate once an hour to prevent the clock from getting too far off by itself. I've found the daemon doesn't do good enough of a job to sync on it's own...
Isn't that a lot safer anyway than running a daemon (ntpd) as root ? I do this on my systems (run ntpdate from cron), even though the xntpd docs IIRC specifically advised against this hack. One less vulnerability waiting to be exploited ... is the way I see it.
Kind of. ntpdate just sets the time. ntpd will actually notice your clock running fast/slow and slowly step your kernel time to deal with your bad clock frequency. man ntpd. Its quite fascinating. RE the "ntpd as root" thing, is there a capability in some UNIXen which lets you fudge with the kernel time/timecounter frequency without being root? I think thats all it really needs root privilege for. Adrian -- Adrian Chadd I'm only a fanboy if <adrian@creative.net.au> I emailed Wesley Crusher.