| Chapter Syllabus 18.1 What Time Is It? 18.2 Choosing a Time Source 18.3 Stratum Levels and Timeservers 18.4 The Role of the NTP Software 18.5 Analyzing Different Time Sources 18.6 Setting Up the NTP Daemons 18.7 NTP Server Relationships 18.8 An Unlikely Server: A Local Clock Impersonator 18.9 An NTP Polling Client 18.10 An NTP Broadcast Client 18.11 Other Points Relating to NTP Most servers these days participate in some form of resource sharing, be it files, printers, or application data. Part of that process is some form of monitoring or logging of transactions. It is a good idea if all machines on the network have the same notion of what the current time is so that the timestamp associated with transactions is consistent across the network. That is where the Network Time Protocol (NTP) comes in. Whether the time that machines use is accurate is a separate issue. At this stage, all we want to ensure is that all machines use the same time. The NTP software has been part of HP-UX since HP-UX version 10. A machine can take various roles in an NTP configuration from a server to a broadcast client. This chapter discusses those roles, as well as configures both NTP servers and clients . |