How to set your system time using NTP

Here’s a quick walk through to synchronize your system time through NTP.

Install the NTP package if you don’t already have it installed.

[root@abubu]# yum install ntp

Check your date.

[root@abubu]# date
Thu Jul 24 13:34:24 MYT 2008

Use the ntpdate command to poll from public NTP servers. I this example I’ll use ntp servers provided by the NTP POOL Project. The asia pool is “ntp asia.pool.ntp.org”

NTP POOL PROJECT

[root@abubu]# ntpdate asia.pool.ntp.org
24 Jul 16:02:18 ntpdate[5316]: step time server 202.144.207.222 offset -28647.175440 sec

Check your time again to make sure it’s correct.

[root@abubu]# date
Thu Jul 24 16:02:24 MYT 2008

I’ll cover the ntpd daemon in a future post.