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!

Related Tutorials #

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

Additional Recommended Steps for New Ubuntu 14.04 Servers