You have reached the Operator.

I'm on moominmolly's old laptop, a box I dearly love. I still haven't configured the hibernation on it but I will some day.

I'm busy turning it into a Gentoo box and some flavor of BSD. To expedite prof of concept, I installed Knoppix on it. This means I can work on setup aspects without needing a CD-ROM and I can also keep a couple chat clients going.

Anyway, I noticed the clock was kinda fast -- about nine minutes. So I tried to type "man ntp" to figure out Knoppix's specific settings. No dice. I couldn't remember what Debian uses for network time protocol. So I did what any lazy admin does: I ran "updatedb". This is the Linux equivalent of refreshing the fast indexing database in Windows. When it came back a minute or so later, I typed "locate ntp" and got some files named "ntpdate".

I pulled up its manual and noticed all it needed for a parameter was the name of an NTP server. I racked my brain a little. NASA has an NTP server but they've gotten picky about using it as a primary. The same was true for the National Institute for Standardized Time. In fact, the only server I could think of with the bandwidth and lack of security was...

# ntpdate time.windows.com

I got a very fast offset response and soon enough I was back to work. I love getting someone else's money's worth from Microsoft.

-my shabbes goy lives in Redmond, Dante