Hi,

I am looking for information on synchronising our systems using NTP?

Has anybody done it?

When is it safe to do it?

Both our systems lose time of no apparent reason. A few seconds a week.
However I avoided syncronising the time because I am afraid of the impact on Baan and our Oracle database.

Baan runs on the application server, and Oracle runs on the Database server.

Do I need to shutdown both first?

Aidan:confused:

Hi Aidan,

NTP is usually safe to use as it will synchronize the times by small 'trickles'. You can setup your DB and application server as mutual NTP peers so that they synchronize each other and themselves.

Hi Patrick,

I would appreciate if you could help me set started.

Where can I get the information required, both our systems are 5 minutes fast and it is getting woirseby the week.

seems to lose a few seconds weekly

Aidan

Aidan,

You need 2 things:
configure the config file in /etc/ntp.conf
start the NTP daemon from /sbin/init.d/xntpd

For configuring the /etc/ntp.conf you can use the SAM interface: Go to Time -> NTP Network Time Sources. Then add a host as relation 'peer', ie on your application server you specify the DB server as host name and vice versa.

For starting the daemon automatically, you can set the auto-start flag in /etc/rc.config.d/netdaemons. Manually, you can start the daemon with:
cd /sbin/init.d/xntpd start

You have to give the NTP daemon several hours to catch up the time difference, possibly it might even take a full day.

You can check whether your NTP servers are synchronizing properly by using ntpq:
root@homer [/etc/rc.config.d] # ntpq
ntpq> opeers
remote local st t when poll reach delay offset disp

+barney 192.91.15.3 5 u 712 1024 377 0.40 2.236 1.82
*moe 192.91.15.3 4 u 603 1024 377 0.40 -0.750 5.28
LOCAL(1) 127.0.0.1 3 l 49 64 377 0.00 0.000 10.01