How do you prevent openvpn clients from changing the system clock?

Rusty Weber

6/21/24, 12:37 AM

I'm using state based routing using iptables and a single user on a shared machine sometimes uses a VPN to get resources not available in our physical location. However, this is very annoying because, even though only one user is using the VPN, it still changes the system clock for the whole machine which makes it so APT doesn't work as well as other oddities.

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Date as run from the shared machine:

Tue Jun 20 12:31:34 PM MDT 2023

Date as run from a machine that has the correct time:

Tue Jun 20 06:32:06 PM MDT 2023

Is there a parameter that I need to add to my openvpn client to not change my system clock?

0 + 5

time

openvpn

date

timezone

muru

6/21/24, 1:40 AM

I find it unlikely that _OpenVPN_ is changing the time of anything. There's a 6-hour gap there, which coincidentally is also the difference between MDT and UTC. Is this shared machine a dual boot with Windows, and the system clock set to local time instead of UTC?

Rusty Weber

6/21/24, 1:59 AM

Unfortunately not. It's a headless Ubuntu server. I've also turned off the openvpn service and the time corrects it's self.

muru

6/21/24, 2:20 AM

Are you using ntp or chrony for time synchronization? Does the VPN have a post-connect script which might be running commands that change the time?

Rusty Weber

6/21/24, 2:27 AM

What's strange here is that the timezone didn't change. So, you might be onto something.

Rusty Weber

6/25/24, 11:01 PM

I've gone through the scripts setting up the split tunnel as well as the standard openvpn scripts and I can't find anything that is updating the timezone.

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