Introduction to VMware Photon OS

February 8, 2017 – 3:34 pm

I wanted to play with Photon, so I was looking for some ideas/purposes to deploy a Photon VM in a Windows “shop” 🙂

There’s always some docker packages you can find that can be useful (SMTP server for test/dev environments for example). One good use I found is to build our internal NTP server.

Here’s how I do it:

Create DNS record

an A record for the hostname, and a CNAME for an alias to refer to it in your various systems (time.mylab.com for example).

Set Static IP Address

mv /etc/systemd/network/10-dhcp-eth0.network /etc/systemd/network/static.network

then edit the static.network file using VI

[Match]

Name=eth0

[Network]

Address=10.10.10.10/24

Gateway=10.10.10.1

DNS=10.10.10.50

Domains=mylab.com

 

Set Hostname

hostnamectl set-hostname MYNTP.MYLAB.COM

hostname MYNTP

reboot

 

Disable IPTABLES (I know, not the most secure thing but that’s what I do)

Edit /etc/systemd/scripts/iptables

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT

iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT

 

Update OS

tdnf update

 

set timezone

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

 

Install nano

tdnf install nano

 

Enable NTP Server

tdnf install ntp

nano /etc/ntp.conf

— add the following configs:

server 0.ca.pool.ntp.org

server 1.ca.pool.ntp.org

server 2.ca.pool.ntp.org

server 3.ca.pool.ntp.org

tinker panic

restrict 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 nomodify notrap

restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer

restrict 127.0.0.1

restrict -6 ::1

driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift/ntp.drift

—

 

Start service

systemctl start ntpd

systemctl enable ntpd

systemctl status ntpd

 

Troubleshooting commands

ntpq -p

date -R

ntpdate -q  0.ca.pool.ntp.org  1.ca.pool.ntp.org