Maintaining System Time

Maintaining System Time



Recall that when you initially set up your Linux system, you were prompted to configure your
system time and your time zone. You may have not considered these settings as terribly critical to
the overall functioning of the system. I work with many system administrators who feel they same
way. The time on their systems is always out of whack and it drives me nuts! 




However, when you’re working with Linux, it is actually quite important that you maintain 
the correct system time, especially if the system is providing network services. You need to ensure that file timestamps are accurate. If your system is participating in some type of directory service or is a database server, then maintaining the correct system time is absolutely critical. For example, each change submitted to a database server from client systems must have an accurate timestamp. Image what problems could arise if database modifications get applied out of sequence because the timestamps are inaccurate. The integrity of your data is toast!





In Chapter 5, we discussed how to set your time zone when we looked at managing locale settings.





In this chapter, we’ll address the following topics:





• Setting the hardware clock with hwclock 
• Synchronizing time with netdate
• Synchronizing time with NTP 










LX0-104 Exam Objectives (N)