NTP not supported

In Ubuntu 20.04, I see that I can not change the set-ntp due to the following error.

# timedatectl set-ntp true
Failed to set ntp: NTP not supported

Any way to fix that?

UPDATE:

It seems that systemd-timesyncd fails with the start command.

$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd
● systemd-timesyncd.service Loaded: masked (Reason: Unit systemd-timesyncd.service is masked.) Active: inactive (dead)
$ sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd
Failed to start systemd-timesyncd.service: Unit systemd-timesyncd.service is masked.

2 Answers

This worked for me on Ubuntu:

Install NTP:

apt install systemd-timesyncd

Activate NTP:

timedatectl set-ntp true

Your systemd-timesyncd service is masked. That means it can't be started, and can't be enabled. To reverse this, you need to run the following:

systemctl unmask systemd-timesyncd.service

Then you can enable and start the service:

systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd.service
systemctl start systemd-timesyncd.service

HOWEVER, it's pretty unlikely that your system got into this state on its own. Perhaps you followed some instructions to enable a more full-featured NTP server, like chronyd or ntpd? I recommend double-checking that they aren't installed before you proceed with the above method:

systemctl status chronyd.service
systemctl status ntp.service

If either of the above commands returns a good status, I recommend that you leave systemd-timesyncd disabled and masked.