Synching Date and Time using NTP for Proxmox

Time Synchronization (NTP) in Proxmox

For many years I have been thinking wrongly about this topic.  I thought I have to sync the time for each OpenVZ / LXC container against NTP servers.

 I have even wrote a blog about this:

Enable automatic time synchronization for OpenVZ container in Proxmox (for Ubuntu / Debian)

I have just found out that I was wrong and making this much more difficult.

Proxmox PVE actually will and should automatically sync time against NTP servers.  Again the key word here is SHOULD. If it does not you have to find out why and fix it. However if it works, the Proxmox PVE hardware node should always have the correct time and all the containers and virtual servers should also have accurate date and time automatically as well.

That is right folks, all Date and Time sync issue should be automatic. If they are not or your date and time is out of sync here are a few things I would recommend you check and try to fix on your Proxmox PVE hardware node.

CHECK POINT 1 - make sure your DNS resolution IP is correct

nano /etc/resolv.conf

Make sure all the entries in there are correct. My entries here are usually very simple, I just point all my servers to Google's DNS like this:

nameserver 8.8.8.8

nameserver 8.8.4.4

CHECK POINT 2 - make sure NTP client has not been corrupted

nano /etc/ntp.conf

You should change the content to:

server ntp1.internal.local iburst
server ntp2.internal.local iburst

then restart the NTP service:

service ntp restart

CHECK POINT 3 - Try to do a manual time synchronization

You should be able to perform this command without error:

ntpdate -s time.nist.gov

if you get error or ntpdate not found, you should try to install ntpdate using this command:

apt-get update
apt-get install ntpdate