I'm wanting to set up an NTP client on my linux machine at home. I don't want it serving the other machines on my network necessarily, but I do want it updating via some trusted machine on the internet. Here are the questions I have:

1) Is the nptd what I'm looking for in terms of a client?
2) Where can I get an IP of a machine that I can trust for a good time update?

Yes you can use ntpd - see:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/ntpd.html

Alternatively you can just set up a cron job to run:
ntpdate some.time.server

There is a good list here:
http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome

Ideally, traceroute to a few and use the one with the fewest hops/fastest response time. ntpd will compensate for the time delays but being closer won't hurt.

How does it compensate (just out of curiosity)? Does it ping the server, then figure in the result of the ping?

Thanks for the response.

Take a look here also:
http://www.bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/serv...e-servers.html
http://www.bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/serv...-computer.html

The documentation can go into a lot more detail than I ever could:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/index.html
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html

You can use "pool.ntp.org", it's a dns alias that will try to find the ntp server nearest to you.
Currently there are 220 servers as of 2004-09-07.

See: http://www.pool.ntp.org/

Note: do not type "pool.ntp.org" into your web browser, it shows a random web site which
probably has nothing to do with the pool.ntp.org project.

/Les

My server is one of the pool servers. Use ntpd. Check whether you have a regional pool eg the one in the uk is uk.pool.ntp.org which you will findhere . Then setup your ntp.conf with three lines;
server uk.pool.ntp.org
server uk.pool.ntp.org
server uk.pool.ntp.org
This ensures that ntp will sync with the most reliable of the 3 and will ensure that you at least get a response when one of them is not available. If you do not intend running an ntp server PLEASE use pool.ntp.org. The people running the stratum 1 servers are starting to get really hacked off with the millions of requests they are getting every second and many are threatening to withdraw these public services. If anyone reading this has a stable and static ip with adsl and they have a server running 24/7 please look to donate some bandwidth to ntp and assist a very necessary service to most internet servers. My ntp server gets about 4-6kbits/s of requests which is quite small. If you are up for this then you can find how to at pool.ntp.org