[colug-432] A Real Time Clock question

[Rob Stampfli]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 12:26:51AM -0400, jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:30:09 [:-)] -0400, Rob Stampfli wrote:
> 
> > I would like the RTC on the server to consistently run 5 
> > seconds ahead of network time.
> 
> I always knew that you were ahead of your time. 
> 
> Do you want _only_ the RTC on the server to run 5 seconds ahead, 
> or do you want all timekeeping on the server to run 5 seconds 
> ahead? 
> 
> By "network time" I presume you mean UTC. 

Right, Jim.  I'm looking at shifting all the timekeeping.

The basic idea is that this machine is used to digitially record
TV programming for later viewing.  I use Cron to start things off,
and it takes a couple seconds to get everything going.  However,
I don't want to start the recordings a full minute early, and in
any event, having to program the start times for everything as
xx:59 or xx:29 would be ugly.  I suppose the alternative would be
to tweak just Cron, although I don't see any obvious way of doing
that, either.

It's not all that critical, but its a question I've been thinking
about for some time that I have not come up with a viable answer
for.

There is apparently an option '-r broadcastdelay' to ntpd that in a
roundabout way might actually do what I want, but I can't find much
information about it.  (Has anyone ever used this?)

Rob S