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Network Time Protocol (NTP)

It is crucial that the system you are installing has the right date and time. Otherwise, you can face some weird errors during the installation. And that's where the Network Time Protocol (NTP) comes in.

The Agama installation medium ships chrony, which will synchronize the system date and time automatically so you do not need to care about it. However, there are some situations where you might want to force Agama to use a specific NTP server.

The configuration file might include an ntp section where you can define a list of time sources to use. If that list if given, Agama will force chrony to synchronize using those sources and it will copy the configuration to the installed system.

{
  "ntp": {
    "sources": [
      {
        "type": "pool",
        "address": "2.opensuse.pool.ntp.org",
        "iburst": true,
        "offline": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

The ntp section includes a list of sources to define the systems to synchronize with. Each source can specify:

  • address: the hostname or IP address of the NTP source.
  • type: the type of NTP source. It may use:
    • pool: a pool of NTP servers (e.g., pool.ntp.org). The pool name will be resolved to multiple servers and chrony will use the best ones.
    • server: a specific NTP server to synchronize time from.
    • peer: an NTP peer for symmetric synchronization (bidirectional time exchange).
  • iburst: (optional, boolean) if set to true, chrony will send a burst of packets at startup to speed up the initial synchronization. Defaults to false.
  • offline: (optional, boolean) if set to true, the source is marked as offline initially. This is useful for sources that are not always available (e.g., sources that require network connectivity that may not be present at boot time). Defaults to false.
note

If you need to synchronize the date/time before Agama starts (e.g., if your system does not have a clock), check the rd.ntp boot option.