ntpdate

[Andrew P.]

On 11/17/05, Bob Johnson <fbsdlists at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/16/05, dick hoogendijk <dick at nagual.st> wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:15:24 +0200
> > Ivailo Tanusheff <i.tanusheff at procreditbank.bg> wrote:
> >
> > > Why you need to do this?
> > > Your system is not fully operationl in the time you try to run
> > > ntpdate. Just edit your /etc/ntp.conf to connect to some time
> > > servers. Per example mine is:
> >
> > [cut very nice example]
> >
> > Thank you. I
> > You are probably right. I'll get rid of ntpdate in rc.conf.
> > I have two timeservers at the moment. I will look for some more in the
> > Netherlands. Yours are to far away ;-)
>
> The easy way to find public NTP servers is to use the public pool,
> which gives you a random list of servers each time you do a DNS lookup
> on it.  You can ask for the pool for a specific continent or country
> (when they exist) as well.  More info about this is at
>
> http://www.pool.ntp.org/use.html
>
> but the short answer is to specify three servers as:
>
> server 0.nl.pool.ntp.org
> server 1.nl.pool.ntp.org
> server 2.nl.pool.ntp.org
>
> Which will give you three different randomly selected public servers
> in the Netherlands (actually it gives you three lists, but ntpd will
> use the first one from each list).
>
> Info about availability of participating servers in specific regions
> is at http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone

Leading numbers are not necessary in most cases.

I use:

server europe.pool.ntp.org
server europe.pool.ntp.org
server europe.pool.ntp.org

That selects 3 random servers from the whole
europe pool.