"ntpdate" versus "ntpd"

[bear at amberorder.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com 
> [mailto:fedora-list-admin at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Robert P. J. Day
> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 9:17 AM
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Subject: "ntpdate" versus "ntpd"
> 
>   (sorry i can't respond directly to alexander dalloz's 
> posting, i have to do it through a web browser.  some day, 
> i'll get this figured out.)
> 
>   i can sympathize with alexander's question -- ntpd is 
> clearly a daemon, while ntpdate is a one-time "call and run" 
> tool as he puts it.  but if you look at the man page for 
> ntpdate under FC1, it states right up front that ntpdate 
> functionality is now available in ntpd, and ntpdate will 
> eventually be retired from the distro "after a suitable 
> period of mourning."
> 
>   fair enough.  but this raises the obvious question -- is 
> there a way to invoke "ntpd" to emulate nptdate's one-time, 
> sync-my-clock-RFN!!
> behaviour, strictly from the command line, without resorting 
> to messing with /etc/ntp.conf?
> 
>   i mean, this seems to be a fair question -- if i fire up my 
> laptop, and it's on the net, how can i sync it with a 
> well-known NTP server if i have access only to ntpd, and not ntpdate?
> 
>   i suspect it's time to pore over the docs at www.ntp.org, 
> just to clarify all of this in my own mind.
> 
> rday

I read some of the replies here, and tried the 'ntpd -q' method, which seems
to hang for more than the expected amount of time.  One item worth noting is
"ntpd -q" (rightfully) complains that the socket for port 123 is in use if
the ntpd process is already running.

Some time ago I started googling into NTP to find the answer to your
question, and only came up with a sort of "lesser of two evils":

service ntpd stop && ntptimeset -s && service ntpd start

As expected, "ntptimeset -s" would also complain about the in-use socket if
the daemon is already running.  It also uses the existing ntp.conf for time
sources.

John Stroud
<Insert some clever sig here.>