I'm running a baking node on an Ubuntu 18.04 server. Is the timesyncd service (installed by default) good enough or do I want to install ntpd to get the higher clock precision that it can provide?
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1 Answer
In terms of resolution, it's not an issue. Even a few seconds off wouldn't affect your participation in the consensus given the comparatively large block time of 60 seconds.
In terms of security, you may not want to run any clock synchronization service though. A compromise of the ntp servers could allow an attacker to drift your clock.
Manually syncing the time every couple weeks is a safer option, and you won't encounter meaningful drift at this timescale.
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2Depending on how much your clock drifts, manually syncing every couple weeks might not be effective; you might get too much drift. As long as you use trusted NTP sources, such as your infrastructure/cloud provider or ntppool.org/en you shouldn't have to be too concerned with a bad actor causing your clock to drift. NTP uses at least 4 sources by default for accuracy, which means a bad actor would have to coordinate and attack multiple NTP servers in the pool (there are over 4,000 as of the time this comment was written) in order to cause your clock to drift. Jan 30, 2019 at 4:46