Timesync and NTP

We recently changed the way NTP (Network Time Protocol) is supported in thinstation. Historically, we were calling an NTP utility (called ntpdate) with a cron job to sync the server time to the network time server, and the server was configured in buildtime.conf.

NTP now has a proper daemon within systemd as “systemd-timesyncd” alongside a new revision in ntpd. The original NTP utility method is still supported, but we added support for both systemd-timesyncd and ntpd in your builds.

If you’re wondering which is worth using:

• systemd-timesyncd is lightweight and simple, and more importantly built into systemd which is included in all images. Therefore you wouldn’t need any new packages, you can just remove NTP from build.conf if your build is using it.
• ntpd has more features and can provide more precision when syncing the clock. If you want to use ntpd, you can add that package instead of NTP to your build.conf.
• If NTP was what you were already using and that works fine for your purposes, you aren’t required to change anything, ThinStation still supports it and everything should still work as it did before.

Additionally, all configurations for NTP in your buildtime.conf will work for ntpd and systemd-timesyncd, so you would only need to change that file if you want to use new options (which you can find in their respective conf files).