About Network Time

Those who work on Linux must already know about NTP (Network Time Protocol) more or less. Here are several things I'd like to highlight.

• ntpd adjust time gradually and almost not observable.

  Basically you can think of it as ntpd does not change time all at once but instead makes every second longer/shorter a little bit. This way, after a rather long period, the time will be synced eventually. The reason for adopting this methodology is that, in production environment, it is not acceptable to adjust time one second (or more) at a time. This is especially true for tuning time backward.

• When the time difference is big enough (say 10 seconds, refer to ntp configure file for actual value), ntpd will not sync time. In this case, to force ntpd update local time according to NTP server regardless the time gap, use ntpd -gq.

  service ntp stop
  ntpd -gq
  service ntp start
  

• ntpdate is deprecated, use ntpd instead