"Automatic Date & Time" doesn't reflect the service status

[Alex]

In my always up-to-date Eoan the "Automatic Date & Time" adjustment is broken since around two months.

0 * * * * sudo ntpdate 0.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org >> /tmp/ntpsync

...is my crontab workaround to get proper time on Ubuntu Eoan.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but this appears to be a "regular" (non-security) bug. I have unmarked it as a security issue since this bug does not show evidence of allowing attackers to cross privilege boundaries nor directly cause loss of data/privacy. Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Can you please elaborate on *how* it is broken. Does it not adjust the date/time at all, or does it use an incorrect timezone?

[Alex (loxal)]

Always when I click on the slider the slider just goes back without adjusting anything.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The report lack basic informations, please submit using ubuntu-bug. Like the Ubuntu version used isn't even specified.
Could you also add your 'journalctl -b 0' log?

[Alex (loxal)]

As I wrote, I was using the very latest Eoan packages for the past months as this bug occurred and persisted. Therefore I could not provide any specific Ubuntu version as the version number was just "latest development".

############## related jounrnalctl messages
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
Oct 21 12:37:58 sun xdg-desktop-por[4719]: Failed to get application states: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.portal.Error.Failed: Could not get window list: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: App introspection not allowed
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:38:20 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:38:20 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
##############

ubuntu-bug asks me to provide a PID and I have really other priorities to deal with than to figure out which PID it is supposed to be...

alex@sun:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 19.10
Release: 19.10
Codename: eoan

I hope this helps.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what's the output of 'timedatectl status'?

[Alex (loxal)]

$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Mon 2019-10-21 15:46:41 CEST
           Universal time: Mon 2019-10-21 13:46:41 UTC
                 RTC time: Mon 2019-10-21 13:46:37
                Time zone: Europe/Berlin (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: inactive
          RTC in local TZ: no

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

So that's consistent with the switch status.

Can you change the status in the setting and do
$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
and copy the log here?

What happens if you try then to enable sync with that command instead of the settings?
$ timedatectl set-ntp true

[Alex (loxal)]

 sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
           └─disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Mon 2019-10-21 12:34:47 CEST; 4h 5min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

Oct 21 12:34:29 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 12:34:47 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.

#####

$ timedatectl set-ntp true

$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
           └─disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Mon 2019-10-21 17:19:40 CEST; 1s ago
           └─ ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd was not met
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

Oct 21 12:34:29 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 12:34:47 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 16:41:31 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:31 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:32 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:33 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:34 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:40 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.

...still the slider cannot be activated.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The sync is failing due to 'ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd'

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2019-10-21 19:27, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> The sync is failing due to 'ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd'

That file would be provided by the universe package ntp. Are there reasons to move it back to main?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Right, ntpd isn't installed by default/needed, it's weird because on my 19.10 installation the .service doesn't have that condition

what's the output of
- dpkg -S /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
- dpkg -l systemd
- ls -l /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service

on your installation?

[Alex (loxal)]

alex@sun:~/$ dpkg -S /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
systemd: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
alex@sun:~/$ dpkg -l systemd
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii systemd 242-7ubuntu3 amd64 system and service manager
alex@sun:~/$ ls -l /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1489 Oct 11 16:19 /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Oh, sorry, I read that the wrong way
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd

Which means systemd-timesyncd isn't doing syncing when ntp is installed

Did you install ntpd? Does it work better if you uninstall it?

[Alex (loxal)]

purging and reinstalling `ntpdate` resolved the problem. IMO opinion the pkg manager should prevent the user from making breaking system integrity by miss-installing certain package. Ok, this might have happend in the eoan dev cycle where I have started to use eoan... but still future updates should have corrected this inconsistency.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

It's a valid choice to want to replace the default time syncing by using ntpd, the issue there is that the graphical settings don't communicate much about what is happening

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Ok, so the real issue is a systemd one and discussed in bug #1849156, I'm keeping this one about the fact that UI doesn't communicate about the service being disabled though (woulc be worth sending upstream on gitlab if someone wants to do that)