We use the NTP protocol to sync the time of servers,network devices, client PC’s with our local time zone to keep the correct time over the network. This can be accomplished through a NTP server configured locally in our network which will have the capability to receive and update the local time from the satellites in space.

The time which they get updated will be set as a bench mark over the entire machines over its network if this machine is configured as NTP server for them. This article focusses on updating the local NTP server on linux application.

To See Current Date –

Putty ssh to the server and run –    date

To check the ntp service status run –   service ntpd status

To set your as NTP server  to get up to date time from them  run below  –

ntpdate ntpserverfqdn

Example – ntpdate ntp.exchangequery.local

Once after we updated we will get the below message

ntpdate Step time server offset sec
ntpdate adjust time server offset sec

To sync hardware clock –

hwclock –systohc

Reason to run above command: There are 2 types of clocks in Linux Operating systems.

1) Hardware clock – is the battery powered “Real Time Clock” (also known as the “RTC”, “CMOS clock”) which keeps track of time when the system is turned off but is not used when the system is running.

2) System clock-  (sometimes called the “kernel clock” or “software clock”) which is a software counter based on the timer interrupt.

This  above command will Set the Hardware Clock to the current System Time which will update from the local ntp server in our environment.

Note: We have an option to set the Hardware Clock from the System Time, or set the System Time from the hardware Clock.

Finally we need to Add the NTP server in the ini.config

Navigate via VI to ntp.conf location –  vi /etc/ntp.conf

vi /etc/sysconfig/ntpdate

Finally restart the ntp service –

service ntpd  restart

There is another option to update the servers from the website ntp.pool.org

We can go to this official ntp pool site and choose our continent area servers.

In order to update them VI to the ntp location :

vi /etc/ntp.conf

We can see the default ntp servers like below. We can comment them and need to update with the correct servers for the respective country where the server is hosted.

In my example updating with my local time zone as below and commenting the default ones.

After the above is completed the servers will be updated.

We can check the ntp peers synchronization with the below command

ntpq -p

Based on our requirement we can set the ntp server to be our local ntp server or one from the local time zone and after this the linux server will be updated with the latest current local time zone.

Thanks & Regards
Sathish Veerapandian