Wyatt's presentation on NTPD last night prompted some discussion about other NTP implementations. (Chrony was mentioned in the presentation, and systemd-timesyncd was mentioned in discussion.)

The latest Raspbian boot image for the Raspberry Pi (based on Debian stretch) no longer installs ntpd by default, but relies on systemd-timesyncd instead. (Presumably Debian stretch does something similar, though that may not be the case...) Of course, ntpd, chrony, and openntpd are all available as alternatives.

The good news is that systemd-timesyncd seems to work for the very simple case of a client-only setup, where you just want to get the time reasonably close to some official time source (it only implements an NTP client, not a server), requires no special configuration, and seems to get out of the way if you install any of the more-capable NTP server packages.

The bad news is that it doesn't do as good a job of keeping time in sync. It only contacts one of the available NTP servers, and sticks to that one until it's not reachable, in which case it tries the next available one, etc. It will use as time sources one of the available pool servers for the distribution, or (if provided) one of those indicated by the DHCP server. So, for the typical client, it may be fine.

Also, it doesn't give you much by way of stats. You can use the "timedatectl" command, to find out if NTP synchronization is enabled or not, but that's about it. You can also use the "systemctl -l status systemd-tymesyncd" command, and look at the log entries showing which time server was used...

Sep 09 07:02:29 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[215]: Synchronized to time server 206.108.0.134:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). Sep 09 23:33:45 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[215]: Timed out waiting for reply from 206.108.0.134:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). Sep 09 23:33:45 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[215]: Synchronized to time server 208.81.1.244:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). Sep 10 00:43:48 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[215]: Timed out waiting for reply from 208.81.1.244:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). Sep 10 00:43:48 raspberrypi systemd-timesyncd[215]: Synchronized to time server 174.94.155.224:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org).

No way to check for offset and other such stats, though. (It may not even track that.)

Chrony seems to be a quite capable replacement for NTPD, with a configuration file format that looks quite similar (at least for the basic config). There are a couple different commands to get stats...

[root@host ~]# chronyc sources 210 Number of sources = 7 MS Name/IP address Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample =============================================================================== ^* ntp1.mydomain.net 3 10 377 280 -274us[ -216us] +/- 71ms ^+ ntp2.mydomain.net 3 10 377 585 -348us[ -290us] +/- 66ms ^+ ntp3.mydomain.net 3 10 377 510 -696us[ -638us] +/- 68ms ^+ james.kirk.hungrycats.org 2 10 377 229 -3138us[-3138us] +/- 69ms ^+ ns541050.ip-144-217-252.n 3 9 377 390 -2763us[-2705us] +/- 102ms ^+ sanction.treborlogic.com 2 10 377 983 +573us[ +630us] +/- 75ms ^+ 209.115.181.107 3 10 377 455 +13ms[ +13ms] +/- 108ms [root@host ~]# chronyc sourcestats 210 Number of sources = 7 Name/IP Address NP NR Span Frequency Freq Skew Offset Std Dev ============================================================================== ntp1.mydomain.net 39 19 273m -0.000 0.007 -814us 65us ntp2.mydomain.net 16 9 90m -0.002 0.066 -619us 68us ntp3.mydomain.net 27 17 226m -0.010 0.013 -784us 52us james.kirk.hungrycats.org 6 4 86m +0.160 1.290 -3291us 739us ns541050.ip-144-217-252.n 8 6 60m -0.143 0.280 -3050us 162us sanction.treborlogic.com 6 3 86m +0.287 0.623 +614us 302us 209.115.181.107 12 9 189m +0.129 0.121 +13ms 262us [root@hedge ~]#

The default config is set up to query servers in the pool for the distro (rhel in the above example, with the last 4 servers shown), but will also include any NTP servers indicated by DHCP (the first 3 servers shown, with bogus host names in this example).

I haven't tried OpenNTPD (The OpenBSD NTP daemon), so I don't know how that one looks compared to the classic NTPD.

Gilbert