For years I have been using something like this in a root crontab to adjust the time every 6 hours: 10 4,10,16,22 * * * /usr/sbin/ntpdate-debian On this machine it was going off by about 0.17 seconds every 6 hours and it was pretty consistent: 7 Sep 16:10:10 ntpdate[11932]: adjust time server 91.189.89.199 offset 0.172249 sec 7 Sep 22:10:09 ntpdate[13949]: adjust time server 91.189.89.199 offset 0.173074 sec 8 Sep 04:10:10 ntpdate[15490]: adjust time server 91.189.89.199 offset 0.174787 sec 8 Sep 10:10:09 ntpdate[18482]: adjust time server 91.189.89.199 offset 0.169422 sec Then I noticed that on a newer Ubuntu installation I didn't have the crontab, but the timing was even better. I'm pretty sure that newer Ubuntu installs let the user to choose to set date/time "automatically," and that was what I had chosen. So I had to wonder what it *really* was doing. I think it was running ntpd. USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND ntp 23926 0.0 0.0 39832 2264 ? Ss Sep08 0:01 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g -c /var/lib/ntp/ntp.conf.dhcp -u 119:128 So I installed the ntp package like so: sudo apt-get install ntp That automatically set everything up and started it running. It can be called with the service command to ntp... sudo service ntp [start stop restart] ...which runs the script here: /etc/init.d/ntp That seems to keep the clock set very precisely. I guess the downside is that it is always running, but it if is using no more than 2.3 MB, that isn't a problem. Is this what everyone is doing these days? Mike