ABSTRACT
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is three things: the NTP software program, called a
daemon
in Unix and a
service
in Windows; a protocol that exchanges time values between servers and clients; and a suite of algorithms that processes the time values to advance or retard the system clock. In this book, and especially in this chapter, we speak of NTP “doing something.” This is rather loose terminology, because the acronym “NTP” is a descriptive noun and uncomfortable with an action verb. More properly, it is the NTP daemon that does something, and that depends on the implementation. Nevertheless, in this book we will sometimes animate the acronym anyway.
