This is part of a guide to setting up Ubuntu Server Edition 11.04 for a small/medium business. The server will provide DHCP, DNS, NTP, LDAP, Kerberos and NFS services such that users can login to any machine on the network and all their files and settings will be the same across the entire network.
Your server will automatically request the time from the Ubuntu NTP servers on every boot… but hopefully you’re not going to reboot it very often. It is useful for the server time to be correct when debugging and it is ESSENTIAL for the server and all the clients on the network to have the same time (±5mins by default) for Kerberos to work.
Fortunately, this is a very easy thing to configure on Ubuntu. Simply install ntpd with:
sudo apt-get install ntp
As of Ubuntu 11.04, a default pool of NTP servers will be used.
# Use servers from the NTP Pool Project. Approved by Ubuntu Technical Board # on 2011-02-08 (LP: #104525). See http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html for # more information. server 0.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org server 1.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org server 2.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org server 3.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org
However you can change this by editing /etc/ntp.conf