dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1 – Frequent Start Issue

dbusntpsystemdsystemd-timesyncd

I have some Ubuntu 18.04.1 servers. They all show this service being started rougly every 10 minutes.

Jan  7 06:29:05 csrf-prod1-vm dbus-daemon[434]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.12841' (uid=0 pid=25418 comm="timedatectl " label="unconfined")
Jan  7 06:29:05 csrf-prod1-vm systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Jan  7 06:29:05 csrf-prod1-vm dbus-daemon[434]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Jan  7 06:29:05 csrf-prod1-vm systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.

Perhaps of note is I have configured timesyncd with some network-local ntp servers.

$ timedatectl status
                      Local time: Mon 2019-01-07 18:15:54 UTC
                  Universal time: Mon 2019-01-07 18:15:54 UTC
                        RTC time: Mon 2019-01-07 18:15:55
                       Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
                 RTC in local TZ: no

It appears that this service just starts systemd-timedated. Is this what's used by systemd-timesyncd in order to set the time? Why does it not stay running as the suffix d[aemon] would suggest? Or is it redundant to systemd-timesyncd and should be disabled in some way?

Best Answer

systemd-timesyncd is one-shot so it's more of an SNTP client rather than an NTP one. I've seen situations where it was triggered each time you get a DHCP lease and if your leases have a short period it is triggered frequently. The snippet of the log you enclosed doesn't give enough information though - that just looks like one activation and start...

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