[ale] Time Synching for a dial-up connection: a solution

[Ben Coleman]

A while back some of us were asking about time syncing software for use
from a dial-up internet connection.  In my case, I wanted something
compatible with Dial-on-Demand that wouldn't continually hold the line
up with packets to and from the time servers.

I recently went looking again, and found a package called chrony that
fits the bill nicely.  You can get it from Metalab, or from the chrony
web page at http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/chrony/.  One of its major
features is that you can tell it when you're online or offline,
typically by adding a few lines to the ip-up and ip-down scripts that
pppd runs.  It will also itself operate as an NTP server.

I've got it running on my firewall machine, syncing to my ISP's NTP
server when connected, and providing NTP services to the other machines
on my LAN(the linux machines also run chrony).  The only thing I had to
do to make it fully compatible with Dial-on-Demand was to make sure
that the minimum poll interval was longer than the idle timeout I had
set up with pppd.

Ben
--
Ben Coleman oloryn at mindspring.com    | The attempt to legislatively
http://oloryn.home.mindspring.com/   | micromanage equality results, at
                                     | best, in equal misery for all.