| Author: | John M. Gabriele |
|---|---|
| Date: | May 2007 |
| Back to: | homepage |
There's two clocks on your system: the hardware clock and the system clock. The hardware clock is the one you're used to setting in the BIOS. You can also set it from the Linux command line. The system clock is what time the kernel thinks it is -- including corrections for timezone and daylight savings time. Read more about this in the helpful man page for hwclock.
In general, you should always keep your hardware clock set to UTC.
For some quick commands, see the debian reference (specifically, this portion).
The commands it suggests you use are:
# date MMDDhhmmCCYY # hwclock --utc --systohc # hwclock --show
where MMDDhhmmCCYY is your local time. The --utc option to hwclock takes care of converting that to UTC for the hardware clock. That last hwclock --show will show you local time, even though it's actually set to UTC. After that, make sure your /etc/default/rcS has set UTC=yes.
The whole story is in the ntp-doc package. That package comes with html docs telling all about NTP and the implementation you'll be using.
The players:
...To do...