[ntp:questions] ntpdate depreciated note

yahoo at rickwidmer.com yahoo at rickwidmer.com
Wed Oct 21 17:44:21 UTC 2009


While installing OpenSuSE 11.1 I ran across a program stub that replaced
the ntpdate program.  That stub prints the following:

================================================================

The ntpdate program is depreciated and should not be used any more. To
quote the upstream ntp developers:

"The functionality ntpdate offered is now provided by the ntpd daemon
itself.  If you call ntpd with the command line option -q it will retrieve
the current time and set it accordingly."

<snip>

================================================================

I'm not sure what they are quoting here, but as someone who has long
counted on the fact that ntpdate does not do a sanity check between the
current system time and network time I suggest that the option should be
-gq since that more closely duplicates ntpdate.  I also suggest that you
mention that the server(s) must be listed in ntpd.conf before it will
work.

It's not a big deal, but if the quote would have listed -gq instead of
just -q it would have saved me some time looking up the options...

I will also mention this to the OpenSuSE developers, but I would
appreciate it if you made the change in what ever document they are
quoting too.

Thanks,
Rick





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