Timezone and NTP

The instructions here are a summary of the information in the Ubuntu documentation [1].

Timezone

All nodes operating in DataONE must report times in UTC.

Coordinating nodes MUST have their system timezones set to UTC. This can be set during the OS installation, in Ubuntu the UTC selection is at the bottom of the menu choices.

Alternatively, the system timezone can be set to UTC after installation by the following steps from the command line:

echo "Etc/UTC" | sudo tee "/etc/timezone"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure --frontend noninteractive tzdata

For OS X users, UTC display in the world clock desktop widget can be enabled [2] by editing /Library/Widgets/World Clock.wdgt/WorldClock.js and adding an entry:

{city:'GMT/UTC', offset:0, timezone:'UTC', id:"2647937"},

to the Europe group.

Network Time Protocol

All nodes (and ideally clients as well) participating in DataONE should use a mechanism to ensure the system clocks are kept up-to-date. The NTP daemon [3] monitors the system clock and adjusts as necessary. To install ntpd on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ntp

Also verify the contents of /etc/ntp.conf to check the specified time servers includes:

server ntp.ubuntu.com
server pool.ntp.org

pool.ntp.org utilizes round robin DNS to randomly select a timeserver.

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[1]	https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime

[2]	http://lategahn.2log.de/index.php?utc-gmt-zulu-for-the-mac-world-clock

[3]	http://www.ntp.org/