NTP (network time protocol)

These are my notes on how to get ntp time synchronization set up on a Fedora system.

First get the packages:

yum install ntp
When I did this under Fedora 16, I got both ntp and ntpdate. If you want to run a time server (ntpq), you will also need that package, and more information than I am providing here.

You may want to ensure that UDP port 123 is not being blocked by your firewall.

The fedora distribution supplies a default set of servers in the file /etc/ntp.conf, but you can add a favorite (probably local) server of your own by appending a line like the following to this file. You can just slap this line on the end of the file, or more neatly add it to the list of public servers.

server our-ntp.arizona.edu

To check that you can actually communicate with a server

ntpdate -q our-ntp.arizona.edu

To do a one-time synchronization:

ntpdate our-ntp.arizona.edu

To enable a service to keep synchronized:

systemctl enable ntpdate.service

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org