NTP

[vijila]

Hi all,

how to set the offset value of NTP.

[Patrick Wallek]

You don't.

NTP computes that automatically as time goes by.

From the xntpd (1M) man page (I would suggest you have a read through it to learn how NTP functions):

The NTP daemon has three regimes in which it operates:

offset below 128 milliseconds
This is the normal operating regime of NTP. A properly configured NTP hierarchy (with reasonable networking) can operate for years without ever approaching the 128 millisecond upper limit. All time adjustments are small and smooth (known as slewing), and nobody even notices the slew adjustments unless they have a cesium clock or a GPS clock and expensive instrumentation to make sophisticated measurements (HP/Agilent makes the instruments).

offset above 128 milliseconds
This regime is often encountered at power-on because, those battery-backed real-time clocks they put in computers are not too great. Because NTP is quite capable of keeping the offset below one millisecond all the time it is running, many users want to get into the normal regime quickly when an offset above 128 millisecond is encountered at startup. So in this situation NTP will (fairly quickly) make a single step change, and is usually successful in getting the offset well below 128 millisecond so there will be no more of the disruptive step changes.

offset above 1000 seconds
This is so far out of the normal operating range that NTP decides something is terribly wrong and human intervention is required. The daemon shuts down.