Received mail timestamp is off by 7 hours

[Anthony Atkielski]

Luke writes:

> 1) NTP is difficult to configure.

I dunno.  I configured it in a few minutes on my test box.

> 2) Finding an NTP server willing to accept traffic from the public isn't
> easy either.  For me it involved a scavenger hunt through out-of-date 
> websites and a lot of failed attempts.

There must be thousands of such sites.  Heck, Windows ships with an NTP
client that it uses to synchronize automatically--although by default it
only queries the server once a week, instead of once ever few minutes as
it should (PC clocks are so notoriously bad in keeping time that there's
no way a clock would stay correct for an entire week).

> 3) If your clock tends to run noticably fast or slow, constant NTP
> corrections tend to do more harm than good, at least in my experience.  It
> got to where I couldn't even run a buildworld because NTP kept tinkering
> with the clock in the middle of the process.

I haven't noticed any problem at all.  FreeBSD is especially adept at
tinkering in a discreet way that doesn't harm anything.  It gradually
slews the clock instead of stepping it, and nothing on the machine is
affected by the slight changes.

My LAN is synchronized with some pretty extraordinary accuracy thanks to
NTP, which runs on the main server.  The other two machines synchronize
from this main server.  I have about a dozen servers in the config that
the machine polls periodically (not very often now, since the daemon has
a pretty good idea of the drift on my system clock).

-- 
Anthony