System administrators generally like things to be predictable and to function in a regular, organized fashion. This attitude undoubtedly stems from the fact that we never have enough time to do everything that we need to get done. Indeed, we often feel that we have no control over our time. Ironically, in this column, we will look at a facility for controlling time. If we can’t control our own time, at least we can control time on the computers that we manage.
Friday, December 15th, 2000
Share This:
Figure One: The atomic time PC desktop clock.
System administrators generally like things to be predictable and to function in a regular, organized fashion. This attitude undoubtedly stems from the fact that we never have enough time to do everything that we need to get done. Indeed, we often feel that we have no control over our time. Ironically, in this column, we will look at a facility for controlling time. If we can’t control our own time, at least we can control time on the computers that we manage.
One of the important system administration meta-tasks is keeping all of the computers running smoothly and communicating efficiently. However, sometimes the systems themselves seem to be trying to thwart efforts to achieve this goal. One of the ways that communication can be hindered is by different computers having different ideas about what time it is. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) was designed to remedy this situation.
You may wonder how computer clocks get out of sync in the first place. Computers contain a quartz oscillator and associated hardware to interface to the CPU, and these components interrupt the CPU every few milliseconds. In this way, the CPU receives the clock ticks upon which it depends. Instability in the quartz oscillator (due to temperature…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
