35. Date and Time¶

SolarNodeOS includes date and time management functions through the timedatectl command. Run timedatectl status to view information about the current date and time settings.

$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Fri 2023-05-26 03:41:42 BST
           Universal time: Fri 2023-05-26 02:41:42 UTC
                 RTC time: n/a
                Time zone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

35.1 Changing the local time zone¶

SolarNodeOS uses the UTC time zone by default. If you would like to change this, use the timedatectl set-timezone

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Pacific/Auckland

You can list the available time zone names by running timedatectl list-timezones.

35.2 Internet time synchronization¶

SolarNodeOS uses the systemd-timesyncd service to synchronize the node's clock with internet time servers. Normally no configuration is necessary. You can check the status of the network time synchronization with timedatectl like:

$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Fri 2023-05-26 03:41:42 BST
           Universal time: Fri 2023-05-26 02:41:42 UTC
                 RTC time: n/a
                Time zone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

35.2.1 Network time server configuration¶

The NTP servers that SolarNodeOS uses are configured in the /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf file. The default configuration uses a pool of Debian servers, which should be suitable for most nodes. If you would like to change the configuration, edit the timesyncd.conf file and change the NTP= line, for example

[Time]
NTP=my.ntp.example.com

35.3 Setting the date and time¶

In order to manually set the date and time, NTP time synchronization must be disabled with timedatectl set-ntp false. Then you can run timedatectl set-time to set the date:

$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp false
$ sudo timedatectl set-time "2023-05-26 17:30:00"

If you then look at the timedatectl status you will see that NTP has been disabled:

$ timedatectl
               Local time: Fri 2023-05-26 17:30:30 NZST
           Universal time: Fri 2023-05-26 05:30:30 UTC
                 RTC time: n/a
                Time zone: Pacific/Auckland (NZST, +1200)
System clock synchronized: no # (1)!
              NTP service: inactive # (2)!
          RTC in local TZ: no

1. The clock is not synchronized with internet time servers, as it shows no
2. The NTP service has been disabled, as it is listed as inactive

You can re-enable NTP time synchronization like this:

$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp true