Under Queue, time-synchronization could be important because jobs are in FIFO order, and if one client has the wrong time, it could place the wrong time-stamp on jobs in the job spool directory. This means this client might get favorable treatment in some circumstances, or, in a heavily-loaded job queue, might get quenched out and never run.

In a lightly loaded job-queue, time synchronization isn't much of an issue with Queue; other applications (such as "make") will probably give you a much harder time if your client's clock is out of sync with the server by even by a few minutes.

However, as good network practice you might want to consider running the free network time synchronization daemon, timed, which is preinstalled on the SGI and under at least Redhat GNU/Linux. Other free utilities exist to help synchronize time, such as the older netdate program, which must be run from crontab but can get its time from any Unix host running inetd.
werner.krebs@yale.edu