NTP syncing

[Paul Howarth]

Mike McMullen wrote:
> I made the changes you suggested and when I do an ntpq -p
> I get the following:
> 
>      remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
> ==============================================================================
>  time.nist.gov   .ACTS.           1 u   43   64    1   43.295  4812.14   0.002
>  ns.arc.nasa.gov 198.123.30.132   2 u   47   64    1   22.387  4812.17   0.002
>  tick.usno.navy. .USNO.           1 u   46   64    1  272.895  4894.98   0.002
>  LOCAL(0)        LOCAL(0)        10 l   45   64    1    0.000    0.000   0.002
> 
> This is more than I got before. The time now seems to be within 3-4 seconds
> of my other servers.
> 
> When I do ntpstat though I get the following:
> 
> unsynchronised
>   time server re-starting
>    polling server every 16 s
> 
> So I seem to be very close. 

It takes a while to synchronise properly. Give it time.

Your time would be closer to real time if you ran ntpdate before starting up 
ntpd though. If you create/edit the file /etc/ntp/step-tickers and have it 
contain the following lines:

time.nist.gov
ns.arc.nasa.gov
tick.usno.navy.mil

then the Fedora NTP initscript will try to synchronise time with one of those 
servers before starting ntpd, and your time will be better synchronised, more 
quickly.

Cheers, Paul.