After having the missus spilling coffee and milk on the keyboard of the laptop, rendering the keyboard useless, I instead started using it as a server. Then, of course, syncing every 2 hours simply would not cut it as the lag buildup could amount to 2 minutes.

The solution was to use another server, well-behaved and well-synced (a trusty NSLU2 running Debian), as a local ntp server running ntpd. Then the misbehaving former-laptop-now-server could sync to that server instead and do it as often as needed without burdening the already burdened ntp servers around the globe. To have it never go beyond 5 seconds of lag I need to sync it with ntpdate as a cronjob every 5 minutes…

Vivek: Keep up the good job! Perhaps a follow up on this post could be setting up ntp authentication?

This is wrong information. ntpdate hourly is bad. ntpd running the whole time is good.

https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/serverguide/C/NTP.html

If you RIGHT CLICK on your desktop clock and select “set date / time” there’s an option to automatically set the time, and select the ntp.ubuntu.com servers so you don’t load the pub servers, be nice and these services will continue.

WHY? Because using ntp – NOT ntpdate every hour, will figure out what the drift of your clock is and set it on a regular basis and prevent too much load on the ntp server.

Just set it by the feature provided.