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codlord
Asked: 2024-10-04 18:39:45 +0800 CST

Missing "Automatic Date & Time" option / NTP not supported

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I have a couple of PCs both running 24.04.1 LTS. On one of them when I go to Settings -> System -> Date & Time there is no Automatic Date & Time option. It just shows Date & Time with the ability to manually set the date/time.

When I ran timedatectl on the problem PC I get:

               Local time: Fri 2024-10-04 11:26:30 BST
           Universal time: Fri 2024-10-04 10:26:30 UTC
                 RTC time: Fri 2024-10-04 10:26:30
                Time zone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: n/a
          RTC in local TZ: no

And when I run timedatectl set-ntp on I get:

Failed to set ntp: NTP not supported

So I understand why the option is missing in settings (NTP not supported) but I don't understand why it's not supported or what I need to do to fix it.

Can anyone help further?

24.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In your system you are using systemd-timesyncd.service that is a service to manage your system time.

    First, check that this service is active and if not, activate it.

    sudo systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd.service
sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd.service

    then:

    timedatectl set-ntp true

    If the problem is not solved, please post the log about this service

    Make sure that the other time management services are no longer active such as ntpd or chrony.

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  2. Generally, there are three different potential time synchronization services that can be used in Ubuntu:

    • ntp.service: the old implementation of the NTP protocol.
    • chrony.service: the newer implementation of the NTP protocol.
    • systemd-timesyncd.service: a simpler implementation of the NTP protocol, mainly for client type computers like desktop computers.

    To check which one (if any) is active on my system, I use this command sequence:

    $ for s in ntp chrony systemd-timesyncd ; do echo -e '\n*** Checking '$s'...\n' ; systemctl status $s; done

    Only one of the above should be active.

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