a few questions

[Matthew Campbell]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2001 at 11:36:40AM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> but having the clock set to gmt requires one to
> dial in once a day into a time
> server to keep it accurate.

No; you can do that if you really want to keep your clock accurate,
but it is independent of whether the clock is set to GMT.

> 1. I'm using dial up. How
> long does such a cordination take?

I connect to this kind of server from time to time and it takes only about
a second on my cable modem.  I don't think there's much data to transfer.

> 2. You need to write to somewone who administers a server close to you
> to get permission to access it.

Not necessarily.  There are some time servers that will allow public
access through the ntpdate and rdate utilities.

> Also, If I had my clock set to gmt,
> it would tell me what time it is in Greenwhich England.

Yes, that would happen in Windows, but not necessarily under Linux.
Linux can convert the time to your local time zone, and the main
advantage of setting the clock to GMT on a Linux system is that you
will never again have to adjust it to account for daylight savings time.
But since Windows doesn't do this time-zone conversion as far as I know,
I would only recommend using GMT on a system that runs Linux all the time.

-- 
Matt Campbell <http://www.pobox.com/~mattcampbell/>