Any advantages of PiHole's NTP vs Chrony?

Hi guys,

I'm already running a Chrony NTP server on my Pi. I notice PiHole v6 now comes with a NTP server.

What advantages, if any, do I get by running PiHole's implementation?

Pihole's client implementation helps make sure there will be less problems with DNSSEC validation of domains, especially at startup. Having the server present as well is a handy all-in-one approach for many users.

It is not as fully featured as chrony (it sychronises with a single server and doesn't discipline the local clock for improved accuracy). But, the majority of systems only make use of sntp by default (both apple and ms windows, most iot devices, and the various linux distros that make use of systemd's timesyncd) so they are not going to really benefit from anything more accurate even if it is available.

If you are using your pihole as your DHCP server, you can always have it advertise your chrony instance to clients by adding an entry with its ip address to the misc.dnsmasq_lines section in pihole's settings (expert -> all settings -> miscellaneous), after disabling pihole's ntp server.

dhcp-option=42,x.x.x.x

substituting your chrony instance's ip for the x.x.x.x, eg:

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I'm going to keep Chrony because I'm a bit of a nerd and like looking at the tracking stats and one day maybe add a hardware clock.

Thanks for the heads up about the advertising the chrony instance to DHCP clients. For PiHole v5, I followed Redirect ntp request to local router - #5 by deHakkelaar. It looks like that no longer works in v6.

If you still have custom files in place in /etc/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.d you can also tell pihole 6 to use them.

Enable the option misc.etc_dnsmasq_d, in the same menu as above, instead of entering the instruction in misc.dnsmasq_lines.

Just don't have it in both locations.

Thanks, good info for future reference as I'm likely to forget. :joy:

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