NTP in 5 minutes
NTP (Network Time Protocol) is one of the most important things to setup on a new server. Accurate time keeping is important for a lot of applications, e.g logging, and it becomes even more important when you start to have multiple servers. Some badly written web applications sometimes takes the time from the database server and sometimes from the application server and if they mismatch you can get unpredictable results. Accurate time keeping in the server business is a must.
Fortunately it is very easy to setup a simple NTP client on Solaris. All the necessary software is bundled and all you have to do is to configure it. The configuration file in Solaris 10 is supposed to be in /etc/inet/ntp.conf. It doesn’t exist by default so you must create it and put the following content in it:
server pool.ntp.org
driftfile /etc/inet/ntp.driftfile
pool.ntp.org is a round-robin DNS entry for a number of free NTP servers around the world. Right now they have approx. 970 servers available. The driftfile will keep track of how much the system clock drifts from the reference clock.
The next step is to enable the NTP daemon. As root run the following command
# svcadm enable ntp
The NTP daemon now starts up and it will start on every boot of the server.
