date --utc on VPS ?
Posted by enz0, 06-17-2008, 03:07 PM Hi all, I just created a VPS with Empire VPS. I'm encountering issues with dates. It seems the host on which my VPS is running has wrong clock settings. Not only there's a 4 minute difference with a reference NTP server, but it seems the hardware clock is set to the local time. In my VPS, if I enter date --utc I get the New York time :-( I contacted support, but they suggested it was my problem to configure my time zone. Agreed, I set my /etc/localtime (since I'm using debian, I just used the tzconfig script), but since date --utc is wrong, I can't see how this can work. As a workaround, setting my time zone in Asia to make up for the time difference helps a bit, but: - it's really a hack - not so sure about the daylight savings time in that area - there's still a 4 minutes difference. Obviously, running an NTP client doesn't help, since I don't have the permission to adjust clock (running hwclock gives me an error). Checking on google, it seems that normally VPS have their hardware clock synchronized on UTC. Am I missing something here ? I'm somewhat new to VPS, and would like to hear an informed answer. I'm also following up with Empire's support so see how it goes. Thanks for your help,
Posted by artofmobile, 06-24-2008, 10:56 AM I believe you are hosted on a Virtuozzo VPN package. I use this VPN package quite sometime back, you can't change the timezone for such VPN hosting.
Posted by vps4sale, 06-24-2008, 12:11 PM The host has mis-configured the main server. The main server should be set to UTC and then each VPS can set their timezone how they wish using the tz files... I would push them harder on this...
Posted by artofmobile, 06-24-2008, 09:06 PM OIC. Guess it is a different case. I used to host with a Virtuozzo VPS hosting quite some time ago. They say they can't allow me to change the timestamp and I think the number of file descriptor is also limited to a set of values. Due to this, I decided to make a shift to a Xen provider which does not have this limitation.
Posted by enz0, 06-26-2008, 03:26 PM hi, thanks for the answers. Support has not been particularily responsive, Empire support doesn't seem very competent (well, they say don't want to manage VPSs, which is fair enough, but at least they could properly manage their infrastructure and set clocks to UTC, and use NTP synchronization). What I eventually did was edit the TZ file I was interested in (it's just a matter of downloading files, editing the one I was interested in and change the offset, and finally running the 'vic' command to update the TZ file). It's a bit of a kludge, but now I get time within one minute of the proper time. As a matter of fact, on this host, Empire VPS did not even set the clock properly, so there are also a few minutes of difference, which I could compensate a bit by editing the TZ file (unfortunately I can't specify seconds in the TZ offset, just hours and minutes). Anyway, since I'd like to set up OpenVPN, which involves either using Xen, or have decent administration skills like setting up a 'tun' module and exposing it to VPSs (which is far more complex than just properly synchronizing a clock), I'll probably switch to another provider. Empire has great costs but in my experience their administration skills are lacking. Anyone could recommend cheap, reliable non managed Xen VPS providers ?