How To Set Up Timezone and NTP Synchronization on Ubuntu 14.04 [Quickstart]

Published on March 29, 2016

How To Set Up Timezone and NTP Synchronization on Ubuntu 14.04 [Quickstart]

Introduction

Setting your server’s clock and timezone properly is essential in ensuring the healthy operation of distributed systems and maintaining accurate log timestamps. This tutorial will show you how to configure NTP time synchronization and set the timezone on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

A more detailed version of this tutorial, with better explanations of each step, can be found here.

Step 1: List available timezones

timedatectl list-timezones

Press Space to scroll to the next page, b to scroll back a page.
Once you find the timezone you want to use, press q to go back to the command line.

Step 2: Set the desired timezone

Be sure to replace desired_timezone with the timezone you selected from the list:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone desired_timezone

For example, to set the timezone to New York use this command:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York

Step 3: Verify that the timezone has been set properly

timedatectl

Example output:      Local time: Fri 2016-03-25 12:00:43 EDT
  Universal time: Fri 2016-03-25 16:00:43 UTC
        Timezone: America/New_York (EDT, -0400)
. . .

Step 4: Install NTP

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ntp

Once the NTP package installation is completed, your server will have NTP synchronization enabled!

Here is a link to a more detailed tutorial that is related to this guide:

Additional Recommended Steps for New Ubuntu 14.04 Servers

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About the author

Mitchell Anicas

Author

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Software Engineer @ DigitalOcean. Former Señor Technical Writer (I no longer update articles or respond to comments). Expertise in areas including Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and more.

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