Nodes with different timezones

Question

Hi,

I have been testing a MultiChain private setup across some docker clusters and I have noticed that there is no compensation for nodes with different timezone settings. For instance, I have the majority of nodes set to BST but one that is set to UTC throws errors when receiving blocks/transactions. Both nodes have the right time as far as their timezone is concerned, but it seems that the communication is not taking this into account between nodes. I therefore see a lot of "Time is too far in the future" errors. Is this behaviour correct? If so, then how is does BitCoin work across multiple geographical areas?

Answer 1

There should be no problem with nodes in different time zones - the issue is rather with nodes that have a very different opinion about the current GMT time. You should be able to resolve this using the ntp unix utility.

Comments

Thank you, after some fiddling I found the problem was using 2 different NTP sources (one from apple and one from Google). I set them to use the same and everything is now working happily merrily.