Neural Advance

This tutorial deals with getting ntpd configured so that your system clock is set over the internet. So install ntpd like so:

pacman -S ntp

In order to get this working visit http://www.pool.ntp.org/ and select the correct region. Once you know which ntp servers you want to use add the servers to /etc/ntp.conf as shown below:

server 0.europe.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 1.europe.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 2.europe.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 3.europe.pool.ntp.org iburst

substitute the servers for the correct servers in your region. The iburst option is recommended. Then we need to make sure that ntpd runs automatically so we add it to our DAEMONS section of the /etc/rc.conf file like so:

DAEMONS=(... !hwclock ntpd ...)

this disables the hardware clock and makes sure that ntpd is used instead to keep the time in sync.

Now lets just finally make sure ntpd runs as a non-root user and in a chroot environment for added security:

groupadd ntp
useradd -r -d /var/lib/ntp -g ntp -s /bin/false ntp

then

chown -R ntp:ntp /var/lib/ntp

once you have created the user and group for ntpd and changed the permissions on the /var/lib/ntp directory you just need to edit /etc/conf.d/ntp-client.conf by editing the NTPD_ARGS line so it looks like this:

NTPD_ARGS="-g -i /var/lib/ntp -u ntp:ntp"

and edit /etc/ntp.conf so that the following line:

driftfile       /var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift

reads:

driftfile       /ntp.drift

then finally restart ntpd and it should work perfectly:

rc.d restart ntpd

Tags: Arch, Linux

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 12:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.