NTP on Linux

Ubuntu 20.04

Show time and timezones

sudo timedatectl

List available timezones

sudo timedatectl list-timezones

Set timezone

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London

To view the current time and date, run the following command.

date

To set the time manually, use the following command (substitute letters to numbers as appropriate).

date MMDDhhmmYYYY

To tell the machine to sync with a time server to get the latest time, use the following command.

ntpdate pool.ntp.org

The time daeomon on CentOS is called ntpd. To install the ntpd daemon, run the following as root.

yum -y install ntpd

To ensure it runs on start up, run the following as root.

chkconfig ntpd on

To manually start ntpd, run the following as root.

service ntpd start

If the machine is a Linux VM in VirtualBox running on a Windows host and you want to set the time to some date in the future, you will need to prevent the VM automatically correcting the time. Shut the VM down and run this command in the Windows host.

vboxmanage setextradata MACHINENAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/VMMDev/0/Config/GetHostTimeDisabled" "1"

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