Change NTP service to new NTP server

Sometimes your network engineer will re-engineer the network and tell you that you have to change the NTP server that you are using to another NTP server.  Not really a big deal, but let me share with you something I have found.

If you use the GUI in redhat "system config clock"  you probably wont have this issue, but as I do not have access to the GUI, and most of my machines dont even have a GUI, I re-configure this with good ol' vi.

So to change your settings do these steps:
1. vi /etc/ntp.conf and change the section "Our Timeservers" to whatever your new timeserver name or IP is.
2. cd /etc/ntp
3. vi 2 files there, one is "ntpservers" and the other is "step-tickers", make sure that both of these are using the new ip address of your new timeserver.
4. Restart ntpd with "service ntpd restart"

You should see something like this:

root@soctxvc21:/etc/ntp# service ntpd restart
Shutting down ntpd:                                    [  OK  ]
ntpd: Synchronizing with time server:           [  OK  ]
Starting ntpd:                                            [  OK  ]

If you don't get all "OK" then something is wrong, check for typo's in all files, you can also check with these commands.
1. service ntpd stop
2. ntpdate <ip of new timeserver>

This should return the time from the timeserver, if it does not then I would ask your network engineer to recheck the firewalls, and routing to ensure that machine is allowed to talk to the timeserver.
Once you have done this restart the ntpd service as before and you should get all "OK".

Comments

[osde8info]

[this is good] really helpful ! thanks ! i'll check this on all my CentOS, Red Hat & Ubuntu computers

ps i mainly use ntp.ubuntu.com

[Clarence Polk]

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