cloudClock: time keeping

Part of the beauty of the cloudClock is the fact that it does not require having to set the time. For that I will use ntpd to keep linino on time. Turns out that linino already has ntpd running:

/usr/sbin/ntpd -n -p 0.openwrt.pool.ntp.org -p 1.openwrt.pool.ntp.org -p 2.openwrt.pool.ntp.org -p 3.open

First thing I thought was that I would like to change the ntp servers being used and select some servers near by. I also wanted to the change the timezone to my current timezone. Turns out both those things are configured in the same file: /etc/config/system

Original file was:

config system
option hostname 'Arduino'
option timezone 'UTC'
option timezone_desc 'Rest of the World (UTC)'

config timeserver 'ntp'
list server '0.openwrt.pool.ntp.org'
list server '1.openwrt.pool.ntp.org'
list server '2.openwrt.pool.ntp.org'
list server '3.openwrt.pool.ntp.org'
option enable_server '0'

And my modified file is now:

config system
option hostname 'Arduino'
option timezone 'CET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0/3'
option timezone_desc 'Europe/Madrid'

config timeserver 'ntp'
list server '0.pool.ntp.org'
list server '1.pool.ntp.org'
list server '2.pool.ntp.org'
list server '3.pool.ntp.org'
option enable_server '0'

I got the timezone to set from this list: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/system#time.zones

I need a way to find out if ntpd is working correctly. There seems to be 2 possibilities: ntpstat and ntpq, but I could not find ntpstat in linino, so tried with ntpq. Unfortunately ntpq was not working either. My conclusion was that it was using busybox ntpd, rather than a fully featured ntpd, so I installed ntpd doing:

opkg update
opkg install ntpd
/etc/init.d/sysntpd disable
/etc/init.d/ntpd enable
/etc/init.d/ntpd start

Now ntpq works!!! just need to figure out how do I parse the output of ntpq to get something meaningful.

On the arduino side, I bought an RTC chip module to make sure the clock is on time, even when there is no internet connection. I will get back to that whenever the RTC module arrives.