Serving NTP in 18.04 = Chrony - Call for testing

[Christian Ehrhardt]

Hello everybody,

in Ubuntu 18.04 - if all goes according to plan - "Chrony" will
replace "ntpd" as the recommended server for the NTP protocol.

This is a call to test chrony, especially if you are a ntp-savvy
Ubuntu user today.
That way we can best find the rough edges (known issues [7]) that we
might want to address before the release of Ubuntu 18.04.

---

See the Changelog [1] for an overview of recent changes as well as the
FAQ [2] which will help for smooth conversions from NTP.

There is a comparison among ntp servers by the chrony maintainers
(lacking the rather new, but not yet completely ready ntpsec [4]).

In general it is worth to mention that to just sync the time the base
system already comes with systemd-timesyncd [5].
Chrony is only needed to serve the time via the NTP protocol or if you
want the advertised more accurate and more efficient syncing.

Furthermore "ntpd" will not go away, but is demoted from main to
universe repository [6]. By that "ntpd" will continue to work but
might not get security maintenance anymore. Due to that when upgrading
to Ubuntu 18.04 it is highly recommended to migrate to "chrony" if you
had set up "ntpd" before.

[1]: https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/news.html
[2]: https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/faq.html
[3]: https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/comparison.html
[4]: https://www.ntpsec.org/
[5]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/timedatectl.html
[6]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu
[7]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrony/+bugs

-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd