The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: HTPDate
TIME GAMES
Despite the cyclical disruptions so typical of LUG meetings, our intrepid columnist, Charly, reveals how he set the system time in spite of a blocked NTP port.
I am writing this article from the LUG Camp at Wuppertal Germany, and the time is… – er, I have no idea. A kind person from the LUG Flensburg hands me a bottle of Flensburg beer, and I say “Thanks”… Enough has already been said about NTP (Network Time Protocol) based time synchronization, and in fact, I confess to having written about NTP in the past. But today, I will discuss how to time sync without NTP. Up curtain and welcome to HTPDate [1] Of course, NTP is the tool of choice if you need to sync the system clock across a network. But there are times when network synchronization is not possible. For example, if the machine you need to sync is hiding behind a totally hardened firewall maintained by a totally hardened admin who says things like “NTP? Never heard of it, so it must be something bad!”
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