It is really important for security and logging to keep your computer's clock in sync with reality.
The preferred way to do this is ntp, but ntp wants to have a daemon running, and wants to load
inetd, which is not something I want to do on stripped down productions servers. Fortunately, rdate
has no dependencies and doesn't need to run a daemon.
These are my instructions for getting rdate to work on Debian 4.0 (Etch).
Well, you need to find a valid rdate server. For me, the easiest thing is to
use another local machine running ntp (so the time is accurate). To enable the time service, edit
/etc/xinet.d/time and change disable = yes to disable = no.
Then create the script /etc/cron.daily/timesync.sh:
/usr/sbin/rdate -s ntpserver.example.com
Do not forget to make it executable: chmod +x /etc/cron.hourly/timesync.sh