[SOLVED] Should I remove ntpdate?

Pozinux · 02-03-2016, 07:14 AM

Hello,

I noticed that ntpdate is installed on my CentOS 6.

I heard that it is deprecated so should I remove it from my system and will ntpd do the work instead?

Thanks.

fmattheus · 02-03-2016, 09:07 AM

Check if you have a cron entry which runs ntpdate. If so remove it.

Check if ntpd is running, if not, configure it and start it

If you want to you can then remove ntpdate as well.

jpollard · 02-03-2016, 09:32 AM

It depends on what you are using the system for.

ntpdate is available and can be used to force the system to a standard time.

ntpd is available to maintain the system to a standard time.

It is only "depreciated" by RH/Fedora. Granted, ntpd causes laptop issues as it can keep a laptop from automatically suspending itself, and it doesn't recover well when the system clock is drastically wrong after resuming.

For any server, ntpd and ntpdate are quite useful (along with ntptime).

fmattheus · 02-03-2016, 09:44 AM

ntpdate is deprecated. See http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/DeprecatingNtpdate . It's not just a RH/Fedora issue.
You can use 'ntpd -gq' to replicate its funtionality if you don't want the daemon running.

Pozinux · 02-03-2016, 03:02 PM

I didn't know about ntpd -gq. It's working well.

Thanks for answering my first question on this forum!

Pozinux · 02-04-2016, 09:07 AM

If I try to remove ntpdate, it will ask me if I want to remove ntpd because of dependencies. So does it mean that I shouldn't ? Or can I use rpm -e --nodeps ?

My question is more of a best practise question being quite new to linux. Thanks for teaching me.

fmattheus · 02-05-2016, 01:42 AM

No, don't uninstall ntpdate then. It's definitely best practice to not mess with package dependencies.

Pozinux · 02-05-2016, 01:00 PM

Ok thanks so much for your answers both of you.