Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: NTP
Message-ID: <89Oct12.121835edt.3216@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 89 16:18:55 GMT
References: <141@ndl.UUCP> <89Oct12.112610edt.3212@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Lines: 16

Should anyone wonder: interest in NTP does not necessarily have anything to do
with an obsession to be within a couple femtoseconds of official earth time. A
common practice around here is to keep a single copy of a program on one
machine and have a shadow directory structure on the target machine with
symbolic links pointing at files in the master source.  I've been burned too
often by compiling a file on the target machine that ends up being older than
the source it was compiled from because of clock drift.  Is it too much to ask
to be able to keep clock accuracy within the compile time of a short C file?

This symlink practice also does wonders for
- keeping your makefiles squeaky clean
- crashing NFS implementations (our 4D/240 has been up since yesterday at 5
  without hanging since upgrading to 3.2, we're duly impressed).

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4