Erik Christiansen writes:
On 21.10.15 23:15, Russell Coker wrote:
The Debian package ntp has the ntpd. It is built from the same source package as ntpdate. If you want to set the date from a cron job (or manually) then use ntpdate. Otherwise use ntp.
Darnit, the ntp package _is_ there. Many thanks. Have purged openntpd, and substituted ntp.
The only remaining oddity is that ntpdate (when I give it a whirl) still doesn't seem able to obey its own conf file, to use /etc/ntp.conf:
# ntpdate -d [...]
If you already install ISC ntpd, just use "ntpd -q". ntpdate is for people who *don't* install an ntpd. ntpd -q has been available since at least Debian 6 (Feb 2011). If you have systemd, and you don't need to be an NTP *server*, consider "systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd" instead. This is installed but off by default in Debian 8; AIUI it will be the default in Debian 9. Running hwclock(8) manually is mostly unnecessary. The *kernel* writes to the hardware clock every 11 minutes, iff it believes there's an NTP client keeping the system clock accurate. (I researched this last month, but I don't have the cites handy. If anyone cares, I can go dig it up.) PS: re "doesn't obey it's config file", in Debian there are hooks in ISC dhclient to restart ntpd every time it gets a lease, with a custom temporary ntpd.conf. Maybe ntpdate is using that instead of /etc/ntp.conf?