SUMMARY: I need help to troubleshoot Network Time Synchronization failure at boot on my Antergos system as well as the failure of the systemd network service. Thanks for any suggestions or insights about where to start looking for a solution
BACKGROUND CONTEXT: I am on a two-week-old install of Antergos (my first experience with an Arch-based system) using Plasma/KDE as a primary environment.
The original problem I was trying to solve was the fact that in the Kontact/KOrganizer application, times associated with To-Do’s (e.g., with a task due date) keep changing from my system time (which is Eastern US) to UTC, which makes any assignment of a date and time useless. (This is the only instance of such behavior – my system time is correct, and the time settings in other contexts works with no problem – e.g., the dates and times of events in the calendar of the same application.)
My original attempt to solve this was to enable the setting in KDE to automatically adjust the time (via NTP or whatever protocol KDE uses for that setting). I went through the motions of enabling this feature, was asked to authenticate the change via password, and every time, it would revert back. Some digging online revealed that this is seemingly a common issue dating back a long time.
By pure coincidence, on a system boot shortly after I began searching for a solution, I noticed a message at boot-time scroll up the screen that indication that starting Network Time Synchronization failed – and this message was displayed several times. I learned that this failure was the repeated attempts of the systemd-timesyncd.service to start at boot. I thought that that might be why the setting in KDE didn’t work, so my focus moved to the systemd-timesyncd problem.
At some point in my search for fixes, I read that systemd-timesyncd is dependent upon systemd-networkd.service, so I looked at that, and discovered that it also failed to start, both at boot-time and subsequently when I would try to start it from a terminal.
So the problem snowballed thusly: KDE auto-time-sync setting --> systemd-timesyncd failure --> systemd-networkd failure
WHAT I HAVE DONE so far (not in the order I did them since I can’t remember) from various possible solutions online:
–> changed permissions from 777 to 700 on /var/lib/private
–> removed NTP (as a separate application – apparently timesyncd implements some version of NTP itself, independently of the NTP application)
–> edited timesyncd.conf (to comment out the “NTP” section to manually choose servers to use)
–> enabled NTP via timedatectl
When I found out that the systemd-networkd.service also wasn’t working, I decided to ask for some help, because (1) there is a evidently a larger problem with systemd on my system and (2) I didn’t want to just try random things without understanding better what the hell I was doing and end up making things worse (which I might have done with my attempts to diagnose and fix the systemd-timesyncd issue, but if so it’s not visible to me yet).
LOGS: portions of the output of journalctl -xe relative to trying to start systemd-networkd.service. I’m not including anything related to systemd-timesyncd because I need to work on one thing at a time since I’m in this rabbit hole so far.
-- Subject: A start job for unit systemd-networkd.service has begun execution
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- A start job for unit systemd-networkd.service has begun execution.
--
-- The job identifier is 3380.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[7429]: systemd-networkd.service: Failed to determine user credentials: No such process
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[7429]: systemd-networkd.service: Failed at step USER spawning /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd: No such process
-- Subject: Process /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd could not be executed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- The process /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd could not be executed and failed.
--
-- The error number returned by this process is ERRNO.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: systemd-networkd.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=217/USER
-- Subject: Unit process exited
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- An ExecStart= process belonging to unit systemd-networkd.service has exited.
--
-- The process' exit code is 'exited' and its exit status is 217.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: systemd-networkd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
-- Subject: Unit failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- The unit systemd-networkd.service has entered the 'failed' state with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: Failed to start Network Service.
-- Subject: A start job for unit systemd-networkd.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- A start job for unit systemd-networkd.service has finished with a failure.
--
-- The job identifier is 3380 and the job result is failed.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien audit[1]: SERVICE_START pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 msg='unit=systemd-networkd comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=failed'
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: systemd-networkd.service: Service has no hold-off time (RestartSec=0), scheduling restart.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: systemd-networkd.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.
-- Subject: Automatic restarting of a unit has been scheduled
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- Automatic restarting of the unit systemd-networkd.service has been scheduled, as the result for
-- the configured Restart= setting for the unit.
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien sudo[7426]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
Feb 08 09:40:45 Area51-Alien systemd[1]: Stopped Network Service.
-- Subject: A stop job for unit systemd-networkd.service has finished
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
--
-- A stop job for unit systemd-networkd.service has finished.
--
-- The job identifier is 3386 and the job result is done.```
