Change MAAS timezone

Features
1

Hey folks.

My region+rack controller are installed on Ubuntu 20.04, which has always been on EDT.
But the webgui is always showing UTC.

How do I change to work as EDT?

Thanks

2 Likes
2

Hi @junior-c

Timezones are notoriously hard to deal with in software and we find most users benefit from being shown UTC times. For example, although your region controller is installed on a system which is set to EDT, users accessing the MAAS UI might be coming from a different timezone and then have to convert.

Please feel free to make a request for this in the features category and see if there are others with the same request.

3

So nobody is saying it should be set as the default setting, but for some, probably many from the things I’ve found looking for solutions to my problems, it causes problems that almost make MaaS not worth using.

Here’s why.

  1. 1st, I live in a place where we don’t have Daylight Savings, so the biggest issue does not effect me. & most of the world does not observe Daylight savings either.
  2. 2nd, All of my servers are in the same time zone as everyone who accesses them. There are times when people will be accessing them from remote locations, but if that happens then it will be easier for them as they will need to do things in relation to the time where the servers are if there’s a reason for them to do anything that may be an issue.
  3. 3rd, just running a non-provisioned machine to register it in MaaS for testing causes problems. These problems are caused because it is trying to force UTC on these machines. They are Local Media Servers, Windows desktops, Linux Docker shells, etc. But when they connect to MaaS their clocks get messed up. They will say they are still in the local time, but the clock will be on UTC until it updates the NTP. This, more than anything, causes problems with non-uniform logs, & sometimes causes problems with Software that notice the clock has changed & require license verification or even a reinstall to work correctly again after.
  4. 4th, there’s not even a way to change the display of the times. I have no problem with everything being stored in GMT, so long as everyone can look at it & easily understand it. Many programs store things internally in GMT but will display them with the localtime adjustment so no matter where you are you know how long ago something happened without having to figure it out.

Why can’t we decide for ourselves how we want it?

Why can’t we choose what is best for our needs?

Give a warning, even make it only doable via BASH if you want it to, but just don’t force it to UTC without giving the chance to turn that off, there’s no reason to

4

Hi @Dr.Mxyztplk , I appreciate your feedback and the time you spent to explain why this is an important topic.

Still, I suggest you to fill such post into the features category as @troyanov suggested, otherwise these wise thoughts will be lost in the memories of discourse very soon.

5

bump

really hard to debug issue by use machine logs which does not match your local timezone
i would expect MAAS UI to use controller timezone