On real life physical machines, time-skews are often a result of a really poor quality of the clock components in most computers (as already stated) and ntpd is a very nice thing to have running... Just remember that if you're going to use ntpd, make sure the system clock is set to UTC (and linux is configured to acknowledge that)... That's the only way clock will keep accurate over daylight saving changes... Otherwise ntpd will speed up or slow down the system clock until the right time is reached again. /Thomas
