The Guru College

Home Network – Time Server

This is really a lot easier than it sounds. In essence, you have two of your computers talking to time sources, and then checking with each other to make sure they agree on what time it should be. If your internet connection goes down, or your hardware time source goes flaky, you keep a somewhat sane time on your home network until the problem is repaired. This also allows you to reboot your time servers, or do maintenance on them without disrupting the home network.

Running your own time servers has the added benefit of having the time stamps on all your logs match, and allows you to run your own time-sensitive services. Perhaps AFS or Kerberos? If you want to run an OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory system, you’ll need time sync, as you’ll be using Kerberos.

So, cutting to the chase – here’s the config on the two Solaris Nevada time servers, vault and thor:

vault (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

`This is really a lot easier than it sounds. In essence, you have two of your computers talking to time sources, and then checking with each other to make sure they agree on what time it should be. If your internet connection goes down, or your hardware time source goes flaky, you keep a somewhat sane time on your home network until the problem is repaired. This also allows you to reboot your time servers, or do maintenance on them without disrupting the home network.

Running your own time servers has the added benefit of having the time stamps on all your logs match, and allows you to run your own time-sensitive services. Perhaps AFS or Kerberos? If you want to run an OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory system, you’ll need time sync, as you’ll be using Kerberos.

So, cutting to the chase – here’s the config on the two Solaris Nevada time servers, vault and thor:

vault (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

`

thor (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

``This is really a lot easier than it sounds. In essence, you have two of your computers talking to time sources, and then checking with each other to make sure they agree on what time it should be. If your internet connection goes down, or your hardware time source goes flaky, you keep a somewhat sane time on your home network until the problem is repaired. This also allows you to reboot your time servers, or do maintenance on them without disrupting the home network.

Running your own time servers has the added benefit of having the time stamps on all your logs match, and allows you to run your own time-sensitive services. Perhaps AFS or Kerberos? If you want to run an OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory system, you’ll need time sync, as you’ll be using Kerberos.

So, cutting to the chase – here’s the config on the two Solaris Nevada time servers, vault and thor:

vault (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

`This is really a lot easier than it sounds. In essence, you have two of your computers talking to time sources, and then checking with each other to make sure they agree on what time it should be. If your internet connection goes down, or your hardware time source goes flaky, you keep a somewhat sane time on your home network until the problem is repaired. This also allows you to reboot your time servers, or do maintenance on them without disrupting the home network.

Running your own time servers has the added benefit of having the time stamps on all your logs match, and allows you to run your own time-sensitive services. Perhaps AFS or Kerberos? If you want to run an OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory system, you’ll need time sync, as you’ll be using Kerberos.

So, cutting to the chase – here’s the config on the two Solaris Nevada time servers, vault and thor:

vault (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

`

thor (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

``

Also be sure to have several different external time servers in the config files. At times, time servers go bad. The protocol is designed in such a way that if one source goes bad, it can easily fall back on the remaining.

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