Of course, "inferior" means that your time may be off by as much as a
second or so, which is fine for most of us but unthinkably awful for ntpd
which usually keeps my server in sync by less than a millisecond. That
difference in perception is why most of us see ntpdate as a useful thing
but why the maintainers are going to kill it off.
Lest others read Michael's post as suggesting that an ntpdate run every two
hours is a good thing for a /server/, I thought I should add some comments.
Most servers should run ntpd in order to keep time synchronized as closely
as possible, and most organizations should run at least one ntpd server to
which their computers can synchronize. Please note that, in Michael's
example, he is synchronizing to an /internal/ server so hitting it every
two hours is just fine.
ntpdate every hour or two is great for clients connecting to an internal
server, but it would not be a good solution for a server. This is partly
due to accuracy issues, and partly since it generates fairly large traffic
spikes for the public servers and causes an unnecessarily high amount of
traffic and load for them. So be a good netizen, run one or two ntpd boxes
on your network somewhere, and sync all other boxes to those.
And, if you /insist/ on using ntpdate regularly against public servers, PLEASE:
1. Do not run as frequently. Update only once or twice a day at most.
2. Set non-standard times. If a million computers all hit ntpdate
at midnight, or every hour on the dot (1:00, 2:00...) the public servers
are going to have huge problems. Set yours up to update at 3:37am and
3:37pm or odd times like that.
3. Rethink your strategy and try to stop doing regular ntpdate
updates.