How to stop Ubuntu from constantly synchronizing the time?

Question

This question may have been asked before but I couldn't find the answer.

I want to set the time with the following command to set the time + 6 hours from now

 sudo date -s "6 hours"

The problem is that after a couple of seconds it changes the time back to normal automatically.

How can I stop that? I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.

I'm wondering if this has something to do with ntpd, the Netowrk Time Protocol Daemon that keeps the system clock sync'ed with internet servers. I'm not sure if it could be as simple as "apt-get remove"-ing ntpd, or if it's a bit more complicated than that — Nick Weinberg, Nov 29 '16 at 16:18

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 30 '16 at 11:33

From what I understand, the core functions of ntpd have been replaced with timesyncd and timedatectl in that version of Ubuntu, as outlined in the documentation found in the link below:

https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/NTP.html

If you run the command timedatectl you'll see data in the following format:

chris@loki:/$ timedatectl
      Local time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:18:42 GMT
  Universal time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:18:42 UTC
        RTC time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:18:40
       Time zone: Europe/London (GMT, +0000)
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: no
 RTC in local TZ: no

I ran the following to disable NTP synchronization:

timedatectl set-ntp 0

But I still wasn't able to change the time, as below:

chris@loki:/$ sudo timedatectl set-time "2015-11-08 07:14:00"
Failed to set time: Automatic time synchronization is enabled

I was only able to update this once I'd gone to Settings > Date & Time and disabled Network Time. Not sure where the config file is for that though to do via cli.

The result:

chris@loki:/$ timedatectl status
      Local time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:31:33 GMT
  Universal time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:31:33 UTC
        RTC time: Wed 2016-11-30 11:31:31
       Time zone: Europe/London (GMT, +0000)
 Network time on: no
NTP synchronized: no
 RTC in local TZ: no

chris@loki:/$ sudo timedatectl set-time "2014-11-08 06:40:00"

chris@loki:/$ timedatectl status
          Local time: Sat 2014-11-08 06:40:02 GMT
      Universal time: Sat 2014-11-08 06:40:02 UTC
            RTC time: Sat 2014-11-08 06:40:03
           Time zone: Europe/London (GMT, +0000)
     Network time on: no
    NTP synchronized: no
     RTC in local TZ: no

For me timedatectl set-ntp 0 was enough on Ubuntu 22.04 (Server). — EM0, Jan 09 '24 at 09:48

How to stop Ubuntu from constantly synchronizing the time?

1 Answers1