timed problems?

[Rich Kaul]

In article <1990May25.141139.14193 at phri.nyu.edu> roy at phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
   Most of our machines are 4-Meg diskless workstations, on which
   memory is a critical resource.  I havn't yet decided if running
   ntpd on all of them is worth it, but the choice is between ntpd 
   and rdate-on-bootup-then-freerun, not between ntdp and timed.

You might just have your server run ntpd to get the real time (from
whatever source) and then run rdate on the clients as often as you
like.  We find every 4 hours seems to work, although you might want to
do it hourly.  A simple little crontab entry like
	7 * * * * /usr/ucb/rdate [timehost] 2>&1
would update all your little 4M hosts to sync up with your timehost at
7 minutes past the hour (you might stagger it a bit if you have a lot
of clients).  We do something similar around here and it seems to work
well.  At least I haven't been getting any more complaints about
drifting clocks!

-rich
-=-
Rich Kaul                         | "Every man is given the key to the door
kaul at icarus.eng.ohio-state.edu    |  of heaven; unfortunately, the same key
or ...!osu-cis!kaul		  |  opens the door to hell."