Setting the server time

Accurate time keeping on your server is vital for LibreTime performance. You can confirm that the date and time of your server are set correctly with the date command. The server should respond with the date, time, time zone and year in a format similar to the following example:

Tue Jul  2 15:08:57 BST 2013

If the time on your server is wrong, we strongly recommend that you take LibreTime off-air until the problem is fixed.

Configuring NTP

Although it is possible to set the date and time of the server manually, this is not recommended because the server clock can drift over time, compromising the accuracy of your broadcast schedule. If your LibreTime server is permanently connected to the Internet, you can synchronize your server to a time server with the ntp program. If ntp is not on your server, you can install it with sudo apt-get install ntp.

Optionally, open the ntp configuration file in the nano editor to add further time server names:

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

On Ubuntu GNU/Linux, the default time server is ntp.ubuntu.com, but there are many other time servers available on the public Internet, including the group of servers listed at https://www.pool.ntp.org/ for each country. Using a variety of NTP servers located closely to your LibreTime server should produce the most accurate results. For example, for a server in the United Kingdom you could use the following list:

# You do need to talk to an NTP server or two (or three).
server ntp.ubuntu.com
server 0.uk.pool.ntp.org
server 1.uk.pool.ntp.org
server 2.uk.pool.ntp.org
server 3.uk.pool.ntp.org

Enter the server names you require, press Ctrl+O to write out the /etc/ntp.conf file, then Ctrl+X to exit nano. Restart the ntp service with sudo systemctl restart ntp.

The server should respond:

* Stopping NTP server ntpd                                 [ OK ]
* Starting NTP server ntpd                                 [ OK ]

Then use the ntpq -p command to confirm that ntp is working. This command should produce output similar to the following:

ntpq -p
    remote      refid     st t  when poll reach  delay offset jitter
==================================================================
europium. 193.79.237.14  2 u   28   64    3  39.571  12.600  3.590
norb.v4.c 46.227.200.72  3 u   28   64    3  47.856  -6.908 10.028
82.113.15 193.62.22.82   2 u   29   64    3  11.458  -0.513  2.629
ntppub.le 158.43.192.66  2 u   91   64    2 122.781  44.864  0.001
dns0.rmpl 195.66.241.3   2 u   27   64    3  22.171   1.464  4.242

Adjusting the server time zone

The data centre which hosts your LibreTime server could be located anywhere in the world. Some servers are set to Coordinated Universal Time or UTC (similar to Greenwich Mean Time or GMT), regardless of their location. LibreTime uses UTC time in its database for scheduling purposes, independent of the server time zone.

Find your timezone's shortcode with timedatectl list-timezones, then enter

sudo timedatectl set-timezone your_time_zone

tip

You can check to see which time zone your server is set to by running timedatectl without any arguments.