Clock is wrong / vanished and can't fix it

User Support
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I noticed my clock was wrong after a trip to a different time zone. I went into the bios on my pc and changed it. It required me to use 24 hour clock. I come back to Qubes and it’s still totally wrong. I try to change timezones and they are all wrong. I then clicked in some custom format and right after I did that the clock vanished from the bottom right of my panel. What should I do? Does this affect anonymity?

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anyone?

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Does this help:
How to Set the Date and Time on Linux (makeuseof.com)

I can’t help with the disappearing icon without being near my machine. But I don’t think that to change the clock its necessary to go into the bios. I may be wrong, but I know that I have change my time/date/locale in qubes by the above method.

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I noticed my clock was wrong after a trip to a different time zone.

Did you mess with your timezones in dom0 and/or the templates?

In any case, here is roughly how things work:

  • dom0 asks whatever qube is the clockvm for the time (typically sys-net)
  • that qube gets the time over the network (NTP)
  • dom0 sets the time in all other qubes when they are started

Of course this works best when your local hardware time / dom0 time is already close to the actual time. You can jump start it by doing this in a dom0 terminal (replace 12:00:00 with your actual time):

  1. sudo date --set 12:00:00
  2. sudo hwclock --systohc

This will set your actual time in dom0 and then set the same time in your hardware clock (“BIOS”).

I try to change timezones and they are all wrong.

Call sudo hwclock to see the time and timezone your hardware clock is configured for. Call timedatectl to see the time and timezone dom0 is configured for. You can use that same command with the set-timezone parameter to set your timezone in dom0.

the clock vanished from the bottom right of my panel.

It might have crashed depending on your input (you hacker! ;-). It should be back when you restart or logout/login. In the worst case go into the panel preferences and remove / re-add the clock to your XFCE panel.

Does this affect anonymity?

Not inside your Whonix qubes, which are always set to UTC and with a randomly delayed time. Regarding anonymity the issue is two qubes being correlated having exactly the same time. That is an issue no matter what time/timezone you use. I don’t think it’s terribly important for most folks though. You are much more likely to be identified by doing something stupid like mixing identities etc.

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