Time Setting and NTP Support

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is an Internet-standard protocol built on top of TCP/IP, which provides a mechanism to synchronize network devices and computers that’s accurate to a millisecond. NTP is based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a time scale that couples the highly accurate atomic time with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is based on the rotation rate of the Earth.

NTP ultimately synchronizes distributed time server and client clocks to the United States Naval Observatory Master Clocks in Washington, D.C., and in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This synchronization allows events to be correlated when system logs are created and other time-specific events occur. Some network processes confirm time synchronization and won’t accept updates or instructions from a device with an older time. NTP is defined in RFC 1305.