On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 02:15:33PM -0500, Christopher Ness wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 11:09, Phil Hannent wrote:
> > I also am not bothered about running a time server, just really want it
> > to sync on boot or every hour would be good enough.
>
> You could create a cron job in root and have it run daily. Here's my
> cron entry. This runs every day at noon, to do this hourly change the
> 12 to a *.
>
> 00 12 * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate -u -s -t 20 ntp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca....
Be kind to your time servers and do this in a pseudo random way.
i.e. be fashionably late. Change the 00 for minutes to be something
random for each machine you setup this type of cron task. No good reason
to do it at 12 either for once a day tasks.
For once a day tasks like this you only need to invent fashionable numbers once
for each box. Rolling dice or something like this will get some.
# bash
expr $RANDOM \% 60; expr $RANDOM \% 24
Little tricks like this can reduce pileups on lots of shared services.
For example those that maintain personal/local yum/up2date mirrors with cron
could smooth the load by picking a random time to update.
See also the way cool "-R [time in minutes]" option in yum.
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