Synchronizing The System Clock On CentOS, RHEL

How Do I Setup The NTP Client?

While there are NTP clients available for all operating systems, we’re going to focus on CentOS Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is faily easy:
1. First you got to install the NTP package. I suggest you try using YUM for this task:

# yum install ntp

2. Then you want to have the NTP service started at boot time:

# chkconfig --levels 235 ntpd on

3. Specify the NTP server you’ll be synchronizing with. I suggest you use the NTP server pool from ntp.org:

# ntpdate 0.pool.ntp.org

4. Start the NTP service:

# service ntpd start

What’s interesting with the NTP protocol is that if the network connection is temporarily unavailable, NTP can use measurements from the past to estimate current time and error.
On MS Windows server, you can use the W32Time service. It’s been a long time since I’ve configured this on MS Windows so I’ll dig that out and post it here when I find it.