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Keeping your clock in sync with NTP
It's incredibly important for Linux servers to keep their time synchronized, as 
strange things can happen when a server's clock is wrong. One issue I've run into 
that's especially problematic is file synchronization utilities, which will exhibit 
strange behavior when the underlying clock of the server is incorrect. However, 
Ubuntu servers provide packages for the NTP client and server within the default 
repositories to help keep your time in sync.
Before we set up NTP, we should first ensure that our server is set up for the correct 
time zone. If you use the 
timedatectl
 command with no options, it will show you 
what your current settings are. If I run 
timedatectl
 on one of my servers, I see the 
following output:
Time zone: America/Detroit (EDT, -0400)
For my use case, that's the proper setting. On your end though, the results 
may not be correct. If not, then we can set the appropriate time zone also with 
the 
timedatectl
 command. But in order to do that, we need to know what the 
appropriate setting is for our area. The following command will provide us with a 
list:
timedatectl list-timezones 
The result of that command will dump quite a few different time zones onto your 
screen. You can use the up and down arrows to scroll through the results. When you 
do find the timezone that matches your area, you can set it with a command similar 
to the following:
sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Detroit
In my case, I'm setting my timezone to 
America/Detroit
, which it already was. If my 
timezone setting was incorrect, that would've fixed it. Essentially, we just want to 
ensure our timezone setting is correct at this point before we continue on.
To facilitate keeping our clock synchronized, Ubuntu Server 20.04 includes the 
systemd-timesyncd 
package by default, which should already be present in your 
installation. This daemon runs in the background, and keeps your clock in sync. If 
it's working properly, incorrect time on your server should not be a problem. You 
can verify the current date and time by simply running the 
date
 command. You can 
also check the status of the 
systemd-timesyncd
 daemon to ensure that it's working:
systemctl status systemd-timesyncd 

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Setting Up Network Services