With any luck, this will be one of my shortest posts.
I’m currently in the middle of a tour and driving across the United States. When I’m done, it will be well over 4,000 miles. It’s nice, playing to packed stadiums every night.
However, I needed to change my time zone as I journeyed, which seemed odd to me. Why wasn’t it doing so automatically?
Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The service we’ll be briefly looking at today is systemd-timesyncd, and its purpose is self-explanatory.
Its configuration file is located at /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf. In it, you can add time servers (it defaults to ntp.ubuntu.com) and other settings. You can see the current default values by running the following command:
$ timedatectl show-timesync --all
LinkNTPServers=
SystemNTPServers=
FallbackNTPServers=ntp.ubuntu.com
ServerName=ntp.ubuntu.com
ServerAddress=2001:67c:1560:8003::c8
RootDistanceMaxUSec=5s
PollIntervalMinUSec=32s
PollIntervalMaxUSec=34min 8s
PollIntervalUSec=8min 32s
NTPMessage={ Leap=0, Version=4, Mode=4, Stratum=2, Precision=-23, RootDelay=1.083ms, RootDispersion=16.052ms, Reference=11FD227B, OriginateTimestamp=Mon 2021-10-04 17:15:03 CDT, ReceiveTimestamp=Mon 2021-10-04 17:15:03 CDT, TransmitTimestamp=Mon 2021-10-04 17:15:03 CDT, DestinationTimestamp=Mon 2021-10-04 17:15:03 CDT, Ignored=yes PacketCount=4, Jitter=18.822ms }
Frequency=-1950886
To see the machine’s current time zone configuration, simply run the timedatectl binary:
$ timedatectl
Local time: Mon 2021-10-04 15:23:08 CDT
Universal time: Mon 2021-10-04 20:23:08 UTC
RTC time: Mon 2021-10-04 20:23:08
Time zone: America/Chicago (CDT, -0500)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: inactive
RTC in local TZ: no
The same information can be listed by running:
timedatectl status
Here’s another useful command to view even more information:
$ timedatectl timesync-status
Server: 2001:67c:1560:8003::c8 (ntp.ubuntu.com)
Poll interval: 8min 32s (min: 32s; max 34min 8s)
Leap: normal
Version: 4
Stratum: 2
Reference: 11FD227B
Precision: 1us (-23)
Root distance: 24.268ms (max: 5s)
Offset: +56.987ms
Delay: 203.256ms
Jitter: 31.747ms
Packet count: 5
Frequency: +25.883ppm
List all of the time zones of which the machine is aware:
$ timedatectl list-timezones
Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
Africa/Addis_Ababa
Africa/Algiers
Africa/Asmara
Africa/Asmera
Africa/Bamako
Africa/Bangui
Africa/Banjul
Africa/Bissau
Africa/Blantyre
Africa/Brazzaville
Africa/Bujumbura
Africa/Cairo
Africa/Casablanca
...
Set the time zone to Mountain time:
$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Denver
$ timedatectl
Local time: Mon 2021-10-04 15:50:36 MDT
Universal time: Mon 2021-10-04 21:50:36 UTC
RTC time: Mon 2021-10-04 21:50:36
Time zone: America/Denver (MDT, -0600)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: inactive
RTC in local TZ: no
However, what’s up with this line?
NTP service: inactive
Could this be the reason that it’s not automatically changing zones when it communciates with the NTP server? I have a sneaking suspicion that that should be set to active. If I were to activate that, I bet that manually setting the time zone would no longer be needed.
Let’s see what systemd has to tell us:
$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead) since Mon 2021-10-04 15:32:36 MDT; 22min ago
Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)
Process: 977 ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 977 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Status: "Shutting down..."
...
Hmm, that doesn’t look right. Let’s start the service:
$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd.service
$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2021-10-04 15:58:16 MDT; 4s ago
Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)
Main PID: 63116 (systemd-timesyn)
Status: "Initial synchronization to time server [2001:67c:1560:8003::c8]:123 (ntp.ubuntu.com)."
Tasks: 2 (limit: 18731)
Memory: 1.8M
CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-timesyncd.service
└─63116 /lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd
...
$
$ timedatectl
Local time: Mon 2021-10-04 15:59:09 MDT
Universal time: Mon 2021-10-04 21:59:09 UTC
RTC time: Mon 2021-10-04 21:59:09
Time zone: America/Denver (MDT, -0600)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
Ok, that’s it, I’m good to go! Easy peasy!
You can also use the
set-ntpsubcommand to enable/disable thesystemd-timesyncdservice:sudo timedatectl set-ntp [true|false]