Newbe Dev Stack

Answer : apsd - Used for FaceTime push notifications ntpd - Used to synchronize clock mDNSResponder - Part of the Bonjour protocol, used to scan your network for other Bonjour-enabled devices (printers, computers, etc...) trustd - Used for validating SSL certificates netbiosd - Used when interacting with Microsoft shared drives This is all normal activity. However, if you are worried about security, you can disable the services you don't plan on using. Edit: You might not want to disable ntpd and trustd as they are necessary for basic functionality such as browsing websites.

Answer : Here is my recommended configuration for Windows Domain Time Synchronization, pieced together from several Microsoft TechNet articles and blog posts. If your servers are virtualized, do not use any of the VMware tools time sync features. Just let the Windows Time Service (w32time) do its job. VMware even says so. I assume the same is true for Hyper-V. Furthermore, if you have the both the VM tools and the Windows Time Service attempting to manage the system clock, you can end up with a "tug-of-war" situation where your clock will keep jumping around and never be accurate. Your Primary Domain Controller Emulator should be manually configured to sync with multiple external NTP servers (four is a good number). Using multiple NTP source provides redundancy and serves as a sanity check in case one server starts sending bad time data (it has happened before). The Active Directory assumes your PDCe is the central authoritative time source for your network. ...

Answer : The announcement of systemd-timesyncd in the systemd NEWS file does a good job of explaining the differences of this tool in comparison with Chrony and tools like it. (emphasis mine): A new "systemd-timesyncd" daemon has been added for synchronizing the system clock across the network. It implements an SNTP client . In contrast to NTP implementations such as chrony or the NTP reference server this only implements a client side, and does not bother with the full NTP complexity, focusing only on querying time from one remote server and synchronizing the local clock to it . Unless you intend to serve NTP to networked clients or want to connect to local hardware clocks this simple NTP client should be more than appropriate for most installations. [...] This setup is a common use case for most hosts in a server fleet. They will usually get synchronized from local NTP servers, which themselves get synchronized from multi...