As root I typed crontab -e and typed in the following:

Will this work? Or did I leave something off? I notice that some of the other entries in crontab -e are like this:

I notice there is an additional part in that entry that reads "/etc/cron.monthly". Do I need to add something like that to the entry I made?

I want rdate to update my system time every Wednesday at 4:30am, regardless of whether a user is logged in or not. Should I use root's crontab -e for that, or should I put an entry in /etc/cron.weekly in order to make this systemwide?

I think that will work. But if you really want to keep your clock accurate perhaps you should look into running ntp. It'll allow you to connect to a few (I recommend 3 or 4) clock servers and it'll keep your clock inline all the time. It also makes changes gradually by dropping seconds here and there until it is correct to ensure you don't run into clock skew problems with anything.

http://members.cox.net/laitcg/new/time.html

Some help in setting up

Are rdate and / or ntp on the Slack CDs or do you have to go and find them from somewhere else?

/me shakes his head ... "have you tried to look on your CD mate?" :}

Yes, ntp is included. Or at least was in 8.1 :}


Cheers,
Tink

I must be an idiot... I had looked for ntp before and not been able to find it, and now there it is staring at me in n/. Whoops.

The command looks like:
ntpdate ntp.timeserver.org
Find a suitable public secondary NTP server near you, don't try syncing to a primary server, these are not intended for individuals

ntpdate ntp1.massey.ac.nz
is good for Kiwi's ;}


Cheers,
Tink