time server
 

Debian Sarge.
Can anyone tell me what to install to have my machine synchronized with a time server?
I cannot see anything remotely close in Synaptic. (I have the 14 CDs distro)
Thank you for your help.

ntpdate will be your best shot. It should be in the CD's. Usage is:

ntpdate <NTP server>

Where NTP server is one of the user available NTP servers in ntp.org. You should really use pool.ntp.org as your NTP server, since it does round-robin pooling of NTP servers all around the World. You should run ntpdate with root privileges. You should have your NTP 123 TCP/UDP port opened for output.

I would suggest installing ntp-simple (apt-get install ntp-simple) which should be configured to sync your system time with the poo.ntp.org servers. Check the ntp.conf file once installed. ntp-date is a one off request system. The people (like me) running ntp servers for the pool hate this particularly when it is set as a chron job because it fires multiple requests at the time server and uses unreasonable bandwidth.

Thanks for this TigerOC. I'll do that, I don't want my system to become a nuisance.

You could also set up cron job to run every night or week. I use this to sync the time on all my computers.

/usr/sbin/ntpdate clock.via.net; hwclock --systohc

Thank you all for your help.