Date 18 months in the past without internet

[dkagedal (David Kågedal)]

I have a RPi3 running hass.io that has been working fine. But then my internet connection broke after a power outage a couple of days ago. After some reboots, Home Assistant is working fine, but I noticed my time-based automations weren’t working.

I logged on using ssh and ran the date command and noticed that it thought it was Juny 23, 2018 and a different time of day.

I’m surprised that it can’t even remember the dates between reboots without haing access to an ntp server. Is this really expected?

I tried setting the date/time manually using the date command, but it wouldn’t let me.

I guess I could try to make it talk to a local ntp server, also without internet connection, but that’s mostly a workaround.

A couple of related threads, but they’re note really describing the same issue:

Setting Date & Time

I’ve got a RPi 3 Model B running Hassio and having problems setting the date and time. Date should be 2018-02-19, but is showing as 2018-02-11. Time is also a couple of hours off. Logs in Hassio point to the correct date. I’ve opened port 123 for UDP, but not seeing any changes to the date after rebooting. I’ve also connected a DS3231 hoping I could rely on a hardware clock instead. Config.txt seems to already have i2c enabled. I also tried updating the date over SSH with date -d 2018.02.19-18…

Help for date and time

I know this thread is old but I had the same issue and wanted to share what fixed it for me as I didn’t see this solution spelled out anywhere else. My system time was correct, and the latitude/longitude/elevation was all manually set correctly in my config file. Still the sun component was 6.5 hours off from my actual sunrise/sunset times. On my samba share I went into the .storage folder and opened core.config in a text editor. The latitude and longitude here was incorrect. I ended up renaming…

[nickrout]

@dkagedal

I’m surprised that it can’t even remember the dates between reboots without haing access to an ntp server. Is this really expected?

Yes it is expected. The rpi does not have a RTC.

[makai]

You can had a RTC on GPIO if you need it (look for DS3231 for example). Just note that HassOS has no support for RTC

[gndt]

So how does adding an RTC help in this case? I have an RPI with HA installed at a remote location which looses power often and has no internet. There is local WIFI and two other RPIs with RTCs. In theory I can remote SSH to one of the other RPIs to get the time, but the ‘date -s “time”’ is not permitted on the HA platform so I’m no further ahead.

[nickrout]

Do a supervised install, then date will work, and ntp.