Has anyone tried NTPD-RS (for NTS)?

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1

Recently, I was informed of that ntpd-rs implements NTS, whereas systemd-timesyncd does not:

However, because incorrect time synchronisation can cause so many problems, I want to confirm whether anyone has attempted to replace timesyncd with ntpd-rs:

PS /> dnf search ntpd-rs
Matched fields: name (exact)
 ntpd-rs.x86_64 Full-featured implementation of NTP with NTS support
2

Nts looks interesting.

I recall that nts has problems because of limited number of correctly configured/implemented/available servers.

But I do not recall where I read this. It would be worth researching to see if you see issues with nts as an early adopter.

3

@barryascott, my hope is that I’m not much of an early adopter:

However, what’s unclear to me, is what steps I need to take to configure it, and/or how to verify that those steps have been taken for me by the installer, or that I need to:

I don’t much trust LLMs for this, although GPT4-o produces the most comprehensible:

[1]

  1. chatgpt.com/c/6a7ded3a-d980-83ed-9cb2-72beb74b54b3 ↩︎

5

@steppybug, what does Fedora utilise by default? I’d presumed that it is timesyncd. My sole objective was to trial something well-supported, which utilises NTS. To that end, a project which Ubuntu intends to switch to by default doesn’t appear particularly insane.

7

Try https://forge.fedoraproject.org/releng/fedora-comps.git.

Or just run a combination of dnf environment info EE and dnf group info GG
where EE is the environment you are interested in and GG is one of the groups from the previous listing.

8

@steppybug, I agree:

However, it’s required, nowadays:

Unless one utilises a GitLab instance with ElasticSearch available, to my knowledge, no alternative software provides anything that is that comprehensive:

[1]

  1. chatgpt.com/c/6a7e076d-7a6c-83eb-9deb-4e30fb43c154 ↩︎

9

@vekruse, dnf environment info kde-desktop-environment doesn’t appear to directly provide this information. Is one expected to somehow introspect a group?

11

It’s chronyd and has been for a while.

I wondered how you might query this and came up with:

systemctl --all | grep -i ntp
12

In addition, chrony – Frequently Asked Questions has a lot of information regarding NTS.

I think in the very beginning it was only Cloudflare offering NTS, but that has changed.
Potential list of available NTS servers: GitHub - jauderho/nts-servers: NTP servers with NTS support · GitHub (no warranty that they all work or the list is complete)

Example output of chrony with NTS option enabled in /etc/chrony.conf

chronyc sources

MS Name/IP address         Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample               
===============================================================================
^* ptbtime1.ptb.de               1   6    17    54  +1157us[+1722us] +/-   12ms
^- ptbtime2.ptb.de               1   6    17    53   -609us[ -609us] +/-   11ms
^- ptbtime3.ptb.de               1   6    17    53    +41us[  +41us] +/-   10ms
^- ptbtime4.ptb.de               1   6    17    53  -1291us[-1291us] +/-   12ms
^- ntp3.rrze.uni-erlangen.de     1   6    17    53  +2861us[+2861us] +/-   14ms

sudo chronyc -N authdata

Name/IP address             Mode KeyID Type KLen Last Atmp  NAK Cook CLen
=========================================================================
ptbtime1.ptb.de              NTS     1   15  256   62    0    0    8  100
ptbtime2.ptb.de              NTS     1   15  256   61    0    0    8  100
ptbtime3.ptb.de              NTS     1   15  256   62    0    0    8  100
ptbtime4.ptb.de              NTS     1   15  256   62    0    0    8  100
ntp3.fau.de                  NTS     1   15  256   62    0    0    8  104
15

Not off the top of my head. I am speaking from experience running fedora server and kde plasma for a few years where chrony has been the default for a very long time.

16

Yes you you are. First you get a list of groups, and then you have to check the contents of each group. Then there may be some extra packages according to some control files at https://forge.fedoraproject.org/releng/kiwi-descriptions.git. Don’t ask me how to interpret that, though.

Also check the presets in /usr/lib/systemd/system-preset/*, where the first file in numeric order takes precedence.

17

You can check what groups a package is in with:
dnf group list --hidden --contains-pkgs=chrony

You can then look at the environment info to see what group pulls the package in.

You can also look through the kiwi desktop files to see which groups/environments are pulled in.