"Automatic Date & Time" doesn't reflect the service status

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but this appears to be a "regular" (non-security) bug. I have unmarked it as a security issue since this bug does not show evidence of allowing attackers to cross privilege boundaries nor directly cause loss of data/privacy. Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.

Can you please elaborate on *how* it is broken. Does it not adjust the date/time at all, or does it use an incorrect timezone?

Always when I click on the slider the slider just goes back without adjusting anything.

The report lack basic informations, please submit using ubuntu-bug. Like the Ubuntu version used isn't even specified.
Could you also add your 'journalctl -b 0' log?

As I wrote, I was using the very latest Eoan packages for the past months as this bug occurred and persisted. Therefore I could not provide any specific Ubuntu version as the version number was just "latest development".

############## related jounrnalctl messages
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:37:19 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:37:49 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
Oct 21 12:37:58 sun xdg-desktop-por[4719]: Failed to get application states: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.portal.Error.Failed: Could not get window list: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: App introspection not allowed
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.timedate1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.timedate1.service' requested by ':1.284' (uid=1000 pid=21820 comm="gnome-control-center datetime " label="unconfined")
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun systemd[1]: systemd-timedated.service: Succeeded.
Oct 21 12:38:19 sun systemd[1]: Starting Time & Date Service...
Oct 21 12:38:20 sun dbus-daemon[1577]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1'
Oct 21 12:38:20 sun systemd[1]: Started Time & Date Service.
##############

ubuntu-bug asks me to provide a PID and I have really other priorities to deal with than to figure out which PID it is supposed to be...

alex@sun:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 19.10
Release: 19.10
Codename: eoan

I hope this helps.

what's the output of 'timedatectl status'?

$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Mon 2019-10-21 15:46:41 CEST
           Universal time: Mon 2019-10-21 13:46:41 UTC
                 RTC time: Mon 2019-10-21 13:46:37
                Time zone: Europe/Berlin (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: inactive
          RTC in local TZ: no

So that's consistent with the switch status.

Can you change the status in the setting and do
$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
and copy the log here?

What happens if you try then to enable sync with that command instead of the settings?
$ timedatectl set-ntp true

 sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
           └─disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Mon 2019-10-21 12:34:47 CEST; 4h 5min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

Oct 21 12:34:29 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 12:34:47 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.

#####

$ timedatectl set-ntp true

$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
● systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
           └─disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Mon 2019-10-21 17:19:40 CEST; 1s ago
           └─ ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd was not met
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

Oct 21 12:34:29 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 12:34:47 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 16:41:31 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:31 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:32 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:33 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:34 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.
Oct 21 17:19:40 sun systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in Network Time Synchronization being skipped.

...still the slider cannot be activated.

The sync is failing due to 'ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd'

On 2019-10-21 19:27, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> The sync is failing due to 'ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd'

That file would be provided by the universe package ntp. Are there reasons to move it back to main?

Right, ntpd isn't installed by default/needed, it's weird because on my 19.10 installation the .service doesn't have that condition

what's the output of
- dpkg -S /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
- dpkg -l systemd
- ls -l /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service

on your installation?

alex@sun:~/$ dpkg -S /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
systemd: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
alex@sun:~/$ dpkg -l systemd
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=================================
ii systemd 242-7ubuntu3 amd64 system and service manager
alex@sun:~/$ ls -l /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1489 Oct 11 16:19 /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service

Oh, sorry, I read that the wrong way
ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd

Which means systemd-timesyncd isn't doing syncing when ntp is installed

Did you install ntpd? Does it work better if you uninstall it?

purging and reinstalling `ntpdate` resolved the problem. IMO opinion the pkg manager should prevent the user from making breaking system integrity by miss-installing certain package. Ok, this might have happend in the eoan dev cycle where I have started to use eoan... but still future updates should have corrected this inconsistency.

It's a valid choice to want to replace the default time syncing by using ntpd, the issue there is that the graphical settings don't communicate much about what is happening

Ok, so the real issue is a systemd one and discussed in bug #1849156, I'm keeping this one about the fact that UI doesn't communicate about the service being disabled though (woulc be worth sending upstream on gitlab if someone wants to do that)