NTP time synchronizing clients and servers, Unix Linux style

One major important thing in any server environment is time. Without syncronised time between the servers, a great deal of applications wouldn't work properly. If you're new to the NTP protocol, I recommend that you read the RFC for NTP. The NTP protocol is other words, very crucial for a serverfarm to work. I won't list all the things that could wrong if you don't sync, but do yourself a favour if your a Unix/Linux/Windoze sys admin. SYNC it Now, or don't and get f-cked up authentications, syncs, backups, etc.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1305.txt

A list of public stratum 1 time servers.

http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Servers/StratumOneTimeServers

Red Hat NTP servers.

clock.redhat.com
clock2.redhat.com

Command for immediate synchronization
# ntpdate clock.redhat.com

Configurations files for the NTP protocol can be found under /etc/ntp on Red Hat and SuSE systems.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 11 2004 step-tickers
-rw------- 1 root root 266 Oct 11 2004 keys
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186 Dec 13 2004 ntpservers

# man ntpd
Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon