[tor-relays] Relay's clock settings off no matter what

[s7r]

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Hello Austin,

The clock is very important to Tor, you need accurate clock all the time.

Do you run NTPDATE or NTPD service inside your VPS? The virutal
servers are sometimes problematic, depending on virtualization, when
coming to hwclock and dedicated time.

You need to open a ticket with your VPS provider and ask them what
virtualization technique they use and if there is a NTP daemon on the
hypervisor (physical host server) which sets the time inside the
guests (virtual machines). Make sure the time is correct on your
master host server and rely on that time instead of trying to run your
own NTP service. If they say the master server doesn't run this
service or set the time inside guests (i doubt it), you can then run
NTP inside your VPS as follows:

(NTP and NTPDATE are included in FreeBSD base system so you don't have
to install anything). Run these commands:

$ service ntpd stop
(or onestop if stop doesn't work, if it says ntpd is not running just
proceed with the following commands)

$ echo 'ntp_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
$ echo 'ntpdate_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
$ ntpdate 0.rhel.pool.ntp.org
$ service ntpd start

Your timezone does not matter. Tor calculates the time in UNIX time
format, so you can be in any time zone, GMT +1, UTC, EET, whatever -
Tor will work just fine if the UNIX time format is accurate. The
localtime via timezone is just a translation/calculation of UNIX
timestamp.

On 11/14/2014 6:59 AM, Austin Bentley wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I have an interesting problem. I am monitoring my relay using arm.
> I am getting the following warnings:
> 
>> 05:56:12 [WARN] Received directory with skewed time (server
> '154.35.32.5:80'): It seems that our clock is behind by 1 hours, 0 
> minutes, or that theirs is ahead. Tor requires an accurate clock
> to work: please check your time, timezone, and date settings.
> 
> Most of the messages tell me that my clock is an hour behind.
> However, I also get these messages occasionally (but not as
> often):
>> 02:07:27 [WARN] Our clock is 52 minutes, 35 seconds behind the
>> time
> published in the consensus network status document (2014-11-14
> 02:00:00 UTC).  Tor needs an accurate clock to work correctly.
> Please check your time and date settings!
> 
> 
> I am running a Tor exit relay on a FreeBSD VPS. Said VPS is in
> Czech Republic. If I set the time to CET, it is 1 hour behind true
> CET (GMT+1); therefore, I have it set to EET (GMT+2.)  I have
> verified the time is correct in Czech Republic. This problem is
> rather frustrating because it is causing my server to throw away
> circuit data as old data.
> 
> Could someone shine some light on this?
> 
> Thanks, Austin
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing
> list tor-relays at lists.torproject.org 
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
> 
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