+23We have our internal time server that the macs are all set to use, but it seems like even though they are set to use it, the time is still getting a skewed. If we go back into the time/date settings and let it sit there, it will eventually re-sync itself, but by that point it's broken our Symantec VIP client for our VPN tokens and we need to delete the vip and redo it.
I guess my question is how can we force the time to sync more often to ensure the devices are not getting skewed.
+29I wrote a script that does a time sync, and a LaunchDaemon which runs the script every 5 minutes.
Had a publishing client where, even though all of the Macs were pointed to their internal time servers, the time would drift enough that sometimes opening an InDesign document on a server from a different workstation, images would report "modified". After using that script/LaunchDaemon combo, the problem went away.
The script was simple:
#!/bin/sh
ntpdate -u ntp.company.comThe LaunchDaemon looked like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.company.timeset</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Library/Scripts/timeset.sh</string>
</array>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>300</integer>
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/var/log/ntplog.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>
+16Dual boot machines will pretty much always lose their time.
Windows and OS X have different ways of maintaining and displaying the time.
You pretty much want to have an ntp query run every startup otherwise things go awry on the OS X side (especially if your AD bound), havn't really found a need to run it more often than that.
+18Yes, I would just run that command every few minutes with a Launch Daemon if it's that critical. I would question why the time is getting skewed that much over the course of a day. I point our devices at the internal time server, and as long as they are on the network at least once a week, they don't seem to go off more than a second max. Right now, I just tried the ntpdate command and my skew offset was .003 seconds.
+23i thought i had it figured out, but ... I don't.
I have 3 servers I want to use, 2 internal and 1 external. i tried the ntpdate -u server1, server2, ext and it said "no server suitable for synchronization found". then I tried ntpdate -u server1,server2,ext (removing the spaces after the ,) and then it just said no servers can be used...
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