A simple, but often overlooked task when running a bunch of servers is making sure they’re all time-synced. Thankfully AWS makes sure a reliable time source is always accessible from your servers. The documentation from AWS is linked below.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/set-time.html
Here’s a simple ansible playbook to get you started:
- hosts: all
vars:
remote_user: youruser
become: true
become_user: root
become_method: sudo
become_flags: '-i'
tasks:
- name: install chrony
apt:
name: chrony
state: latest
- name: set chrony ntp config
template:
src: /etc/ansible/resources/chrony.conf
dest: /etc/chrony/chrony.conf
owner: root
group: root
mode: 0644
- name: enable chrony
systemd:
name: chrony.service
state: started
enabled: yes
Make sure you replace the source of the chrony.conf file with the appropriate file. My chrony.conf is linked below. The link-local address should be included to take advantage of AWS’s time servers.
server 169.254.169.123 prefer iburst minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 pool ntp.ubuntu.com iburst maxsources 4 keyfile /etc/chrony/chrony.keys driftfile /var/lib/chrony/chrony.drift #log tracking measurements statistics logdir /var/log/chrony maxupdateskew 100.0 rtcsync makestep 1 3
This should result in your servers having the correct time, assuming you set the time-zone correctly.
Good luck!
Palmar 