I have a rather straightforward installation of Home Assistant with HA OS on a Raspberry Pi 4. All updates are … up to date.
I noticed some problems with time specific automations not working as expected, and when searching for the cause saw in the logs HA was changing the time back and forth several times a minute with a difference of an hour.
Then I went for a google search for the solution and found 100s if not 1000s of posts of people having problems with the time in HA (and I have the impression there is not really a solution, because of a fundamental mistake in the configuration of HA?).
It seems the core of the problem is a difference of the configuration for time, timezone and location in the front end of HA and the same parameters on a low level in HA OS. In the front end I have everything configured to my timezone and location (I live in The Netherlands, so my timezone is Europe/Amsterdam), but when I SSH into HA OS I can see the timezone in HA OS is not specified, so it defaults to GMT+0 … hence the constantly switching time difference of an hour.
The problem would be solved if I could set the timezone in HA OS to Europe/Amsterdam, but that needs to be done with sudo, but sudo is not recognized as a command in HA OS. Editing the timezone file in /etc is not possible because the file system of HA OS is read only.
I installed the Chrony add on which was suggested, but that doesn’t seem to help.
I find myself in a severe Catch 22 situation, does anyone know how to solve this problem?
When I put his in the template editor:
{{ now() }}
{{ now().astimezone() }}
{{ utcnow().astimezone() }}
{{ now().now() }}
{{ now().today() }}
{{ now().utcnow() }}
{{ utcnow() }}
{{ now().tzinfo }}
{{ now().astimezone().tzinfo }}
{{ utcnow().tzinfo }}
This is the output:
2023-12-03 23:02:00.476665+01:00
2023-12-03 23:02:00.476775+01:00
2023-12-03 23:02:00.476998+01:00
2023-12-03 23:02:00.477203
2023-12-03 23:02:00.477338
2023-12-03 22:02:00.477459
2023-12-03 22:02:00.477566+00:00
Europe/Amsterdam
CET
UTC