Wrong local time on ubuntu ova after timezone change

Graylog Central (peer support)
1

Hi

I have a Graylog 3.2 running on an ova virtual deployment Ubuntu running on Oracle VM Virtual box.

The timezone was set to UTC. I did changed it to Europe/Tirana - my environment.

This caused the time to go (wrongly) + 2 hours forward.

I did set the right time by timedatectl - but it does NOT persist after restart.

How can this be fixed?

best regards
Altin

2

  1. Timedactl should definitely setup permanent timezone on Ubuntu OVA:
    sudo timedactl set-timezone Europe/Tirana

  2. Virtualbox can have sometimes problem with time, if can’t sync with NTP, check that your OVA have connection to NTP server for sync.

3

I do not have a problem with setting the timezone.
I have a problem with the wrong clock - because I changed the timezone.

Can you advise about that?

thanks

4

And how do you ingest messages? Syslog, GELF, beats?

Do messages have timezone in timestamp?

5

didn’t try at all to ingest logs - wrong hour on the server.

How can I fix the hour on the server - it goes wrong on every restart - this is the question

6
  1. By default ubuntu uses ntpd daemon, check your NTP settings in /etc/ntp.conf
  2. Default NTP servers are 0-3.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org and falback ntp.ubuntu.com
  3. Check if your firewall don’t block it, or if you want to use local NTP server, comment all lines pool 0-3.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org and pool ntp.ubuntu.com with replace your own ntp.
  4. I have better experience with chrony NTP daemon than ntpd, it can fix time rapidly. You can replace ntpd with chrony by installing chrony (sudo apt install chrony) and setup /etc/chrony/chrony.conf file
7

Can you be more specific on how to fix this?
I have no orientation at all from what you said above

thanks
Altin

8
  1. First check that ubuntu OVA has internet connection
  2. If yes, check that your firewall don’t block NTP connection to internet, UDP port 123
9

No internet connection.
And this way it should be. The Live environment will have no internet connection.

And I am not looking for any sync (NTP). Just to fix the right time - manually

10

NTP sync is recommended by graylog docs:
Important: All systems running Graylog must have synchronised system time. We strongly recommend to use NTP or similar mechanisms on all machines of your Graylog infrastructure.

Anyway, it’s a problem of VirtualBox and not graylog at all. So check this:

  1. Edit VM settings in VirtualBox and check System - Motherboard - Hardware clock in UTC Time
  2. Or install VirtualBox guest addition to time sync guest OS with host without NTP
1 Like
11

So the root_timezone at server.conf should be left default (commented) UTC.
The OS timezone and datetime must be set according to local settings
The user’s (<>admin) timezone must be set must be set according to local settings
When on Oracle VM - check `Hardware clock in UTC Time

thank you very much @shoothub

altin

12

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