NTP on laptops?

[Palmstroem]

Hello friends,

I learned that ntp lets you synchronize your PC time with UTC via internet - which is certainly important on servers. However, nowadays you notice that ntp is quite often also running on desktop computers, even on laptops with WLAN etc.

Is this a good idea? After all, laptops are not online all the time, they get connected to many different networks of (sometimes) low bandwidth or less stability...

[Lars Noodén]

NTP works fine on laptops. If you are disconnected from the net when it tries to sync, then it will just log an error that the remote clock was unreachable. No big deal.

It's only a few packets now and then so it's nothing that will consume bandwidth, if that's what you are worried about. If you are worried about the quality of the connection, latency, etc, that's part of the protocol to figure out and compensate for that.

[Palmstroem]

Thanks, Lars, you made it very clear.

And yes, increasing local traffic by NTP was my main concern.

[Lars Noodén]

If you are curious you can watch it on port 123 with Wireshark or tcpdump. It really is only a few packets every once in a while.