Synchronizing your KnoppMyth system clock with a time server

For current versions of KnoppMyth (R5B7 and later), an NTP (network time protocol) server is automatically installed and running. The NTP server periodically contacts other servers on the Internet and makes slight adjustments in your system's clock. This should keep your system continually synched to the correct time.

However, the time on your system may be significantly different than the time being reported by the external NTP servers. This may be due to your entering an incorrect time when you first did the KnoppMyth install, or it could be due to some hardware conflicts that result in clocks running faster or slower than they should (see below).

When this happens, your KnoppMyth's NTP server will NOT automatically adjust your time to the correct time. There seems to be some cutoff amount past which it will not make a large adjustment in setting the time, either for safety reasons (making large adjustments in time could cause automated scripts to become confused) or to protect against changing the clock to an incorrect time being reported by an upstream NTP server.

In these instances people use a utility called ntpdate to set the time, which will do a one-shot time correction. As of KnoppMyth R5F27, ntpdate is not included with the distribution. To install it:

su
apt-get update
apt-get install ntpdate

Then to run it, while still root:

ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org

(the -u switch forces ntpdate to work even though the NTP server is still running)

Once the time on the system has been adjusted like this, the NTP server should be able to maintain the correct time: there should not be a need, for instance, to run ntpdate periodically via a cron job.

Hardware issues

In the event that a system is still not synching via the NTP server, there could be hardware reasons why the system's clock is running fast or slow. If this is the case, the following can be a solution to such a hardware problem:

1) su to root

2) nano /etc/lilo.conf

3) Find the "append" line

4) make the line as follows

5) Save changes

6) Run lilo

7) Reboot.

8) Set the time using the ntpdate method above