[H-GEN] TimeZones and Redhat 8.0

[Greg Black]

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Robert Brockway wrote:

| > James, apologies for ignorance - what is NTP daemon ?
| 
| Network Time Protocol.  Running something like ntpd or xntpd is often the
| best way to keep a bunch of boxes in time sync.

There are few free alternatives, but it is worth noting that NTP
only keeps things more or less in sync when running on Intel
commodity hardware.  On a fast LAN, it might keep boxes within
two to ten milliseconds of each other.  But, unless there is a
high-speed and low-latency connection to a stratum 1 or stratum
2 server, the synchronisation to the real time will be lucky to
average better than 20 to 50 milliseconds.  Of course, this is
good enough for lots of purposes, but it's much less good than
the NTP people would have you believe.

In addition, because the standard NTP software is both flaky and
subject to regular security exploits, you need to keep it up to
date and you need to run it under some sort of reliable service
monitoring tool to ensure that it keeps going.  And, for real
peace of mind, your nightly security scripts should provide you
with figures on the current time offsets around your networks.

Greg

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