Bytemark provide several servers running Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemons that we permit our customers to use. These servers synchronise primarily to our own Stratum-1 host, located in York.
How to Access
They can be accessed on a round-robin basis at ntp.bytemark.co.uk, or individually at {a,b,c}.ntp.bytemark.co.uk. All three hosts are dual-stacked, and distributed across our facilities (including one offsite, in Amsterdam) so you should always be able to reach at least one of them.
When your servers are imaged (be that via Cloud Server or as a Dedicated Server) with Debian we will include the necessary openntpd configuration for your server to synchronise with our NTP servers. If you’re using a different OS, feel free to contact support to discuss how best to configure your host for use with our NTP services.
On imaging a new server, we will attempt to set your server’s time zone to match where the host is physically located. If you need to change that to suit your local timezone, then you can, of course, adjust this relatively easily.
Configuring Ubuntu & Debian
Both Ubuntu & Debian can be configured by reconfiguring the tzdata package, which will provide a curses-style menu to select your appropriate timezone:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Under recent CentOS/RHEL distributions you can use the the timedatactl command to search for the appropriate timezone, and then set it:
timedatectl list-timezones | grep America
sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Chicago