Hello,

I am having problems with seting up a NTP server in our environment.

I am relatively new to Linux and self taught by installing Ubuntu desktop version on a couple of spare machines and just playing. Still have problems moving around the O/S since i have only ever used Microsoft up until a few months back.

Need to deploy a Time server in our enviroment and feel Linux would be great for this and get me started with a real "task".

The server must provide time to other servers non-linux servers, phones, clocks, etc.

However, its taking me a long time and the deadline is fast approaching.

This is what i have done so far:

1) Setup up Ubuntu 9.04 Server

2) Tried "sudo aptitude install ntpd" but i get the response "Couldn't find any packages with ntp. However, the following contain NTP in their name cyrus... openntpd..."

So i installed openntpd and did the config of servers, etc, however when i go to start the server i get "Failed".

Checked and found this has been a previous issue on this link:

http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2/ticket/99

Don't know Ubuntu well enough to try another "init script", but also i can't even find rc.conf on my server.

3) Did i complete clean re-install, installed "yum" to try and install the NTP Server for me.

Get the same message that no NTP package found

Can someone point me in the direction of a "Newbie guide to setting up NTP server" type document.

Tried numerous "how-to" documents on the web, none of them seem to be working for me, but again i am a newbie and might not be doing something correctly.

Thanks,

Mike

P.S.: The server is virtual running under ESX, in case that complicates things?

Well this isn't actually about ntp is it? This is having issues installing software, and I don't think that reference is of any relevance here. You've got openntpd installed, which is the right package, so you should look at your logs to see WHY it didn't run.

Fundamentally though, and luckily for you, you mentioned VM's, and you can't run ntp on a virtual machine. On a VM, the clock is provided by the host machine, not a physical oscillator on the motherboard, which is hopefully accurate, and hopefully got a good CMOS battery maintaining it etc... It is trusted. It is "correct". If you change the time then you can introduce big problems with the virtualization trying to compensate for the fact that the guest time is changing, as time is not a physical click of a counter, but through monitoring of cpu cycles and scheduling resources with interrupts and all sorts of gubbins. In a non realtime system like most servers, thing happen - instructions are processed by a CPU - as soon as possible, not at a certain time. MAking all this work is hard enough for ESX, making that correct time a moving window due to NTP on the client is another order of complexity. For VM's you need to make the HOST time correct, with ntp as normal, and then provide that time to all the VM's running on it. Running a server on a VM is a very bad idea.

Having said that, ESX as a lot of problems with time drifting on VM's due to the way the time is passed between them, but that's a different issue altogether.