I was recently made aware that my server’s time should always be set to UTC and not local time. Does this practice also apply to QNAP NAS systems?
And who said you need to set your ‘server’ (?) to UTC time ?
Technically, all Linux devices use Unix time. This is the same no-matter where in the world you are.
Unix time then has a local offset applied to render local time.
I thought OP meant more cronjob stuff … but OP has not made it clear.
Sorry I missed this response!
The boys at TrueNAS whose software resides on this particular server a Dell PowerEdge R740. I subsequently placed a trouble ticket request with QNAP and their support team told me that the best practice was to set all the QNAP NAS systems to UTC, to eliminate any desync issues, which I did. I’ve noticed no ill effects from putting the NAS system on UTC and keeping my computer’s time to local.
Sorry about not making things clear but QNAP technical support did say best practice was to set their NAS systems to UTC.
Not sure why you would need to do that. When the NAS gets the time from the NTP server, it’s always in UTC. But even more so, Linux runs (I’m pretty sure as Unix does) on Epoch time which is the number of seconds from 00:00 on January 1st, 1970 UTC. So under the hood, it’s not running UTC at all!
Your time zone is nothing more than an offset applied to the internal clock.
I am not sure why I needed to do that but I did. No ill effects, so far, and I did some research on “epoch time” and all I can say is wow! Instead of finding information on the one that you mentioned, I found a myriad other epoch times use by different vendors and on a variety of platforms. Boggles the mind.
Regarding UTC, don’t they add or subtract a leap second from time to time and wouldn’t that upset the count from 1Jan70 at 00:00. Again, I know just enough to be dangerous!
Getting ready to go out and shovel the snow! Be safe and stay warm!
Heh heh. I drove through the start of the storm yesterday for 6 hours - Lexington to Chicago.
So, the leap seconds are all part of time everywhere including UTC so it’s no big deal.