Pat Farrell wrote:Some Linux distros do not install the NTP client automatically, but its always easy.
Rather than directly contacting one of the first tier servers, you should use one of the many NTP server pools. This cuts load on the tier 1 servers and distributes it over the whole web. See http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/use.html
Once you set it up, the computer will automatically stay in perfect sync.
Tier 1 should be avoided unless you're, say, Lawrence Livermore labs (who for all I can recall is Tier 1 themselves). Pools are recommended, but if not, use a Tier 2 server. Incidentally, a few years back, a router company hard-wired in a single time server, and unfortunately sold so many of those routers that they basically DDOS'ed it.
Horologists would take exception to "perfect sync". Thanks to various fuzz factors, anyone who's not wired directly into an atomic clock is going to float around the ideal, and even there, things like network environment, temperature, humidity,
etc. factor in. What is horology for, if not splitting hairs (or at least seconds
)?
Since most of us don't require QUITE that much precision, NTP attempts to make the best of a bad situation. Given multiple time references, it achieves the best consensus it can. It also tunes local drift correction, since they figure that most of us are more interested in using the low-overhead hardware time services of our computers more than we are in computing the precise time to the split nanosecond.