There are many reasons why it is important for the clock on your computer to be accurate and not the least of them being so that you know what time it really is when you look at the clock on your screen.

Fortunately, keeping your computer’s clock synchronized nearly to the second is not very difficult. Well, at least it’s quite simple in Linux. I have never really made much effort to synchronize a clock on a Windows computer but I’m sure it’s pretty simple there too. You probably just need to find, download, and install an additional piece of software that will run in the background and use some of your system resources and it will keep your clock synchronized.

In Linux, this is accomplished by using the NTP (network time protocol) and can be set up to run automatically or you can just run it whenever you feel like it. On the server where this website resides, I have it set to run automatically once per day. This keeps the time on the server quite accurate and I do not have to worry about keeping it synchronized.

On my workstation where I do most of my blogging from, I just run it manually from time to time, but I have an atomic clock (well, one of those clocks that resets it self everyday based on signal it receives from the US atomic clock) sitting on my desk next to my monitor and generally look at that to see what time it is rather than the clock on my screen. If I notice, like I did the other day, that the clock on my computer is a minute or two off, I re-sync it.

To synchronize your clock as a one-time situation, go to the command line and become root (su) and type “ntpdate pool.ntp.org†without the quotation marks and your clock will be adjusted. This is pretty simple to do every once and a while and is the method I use.

If you do want to set it up to automatically synchronize, right click on your clock and choose “Adjust Date & Time†and select the option to synchronize with internet servers. Then, simply select the servers you want to synchronize with and you are done.

If you want to check how far off your clock is, use “ntpdate -q pool.ntp.org†and see the offset. That number is how many seconds off your computer’s clock is.