Poor Man's NTP
One of today's annoyances was a third-party complaining about clock skew on a server at their site that they're testing against. No, they don't have a local ntp server, and no, they couldn't allow us to connect out to a designated ntp server externally. All we have is an ssh forward in.
They wanted me to manually set the clock on the server whenever they noticed it was out of synch! Real professionals.
I thought about tunneling an ntp stream out, but that requires udp-to-tcp fudging at each end, or using ssh's Tunnel facility, which requires root at both ends.
In the end, I settled for the low-tech approach - a once a day cron job that resets the time based on a local clock. Ugly, but good enough:
ssh root@server date --utc $(date --utc "+%m%d%H%M%Y.%S")
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