Server
The server's hostname, its timezone, and keeping the clock in sync.
Three settings, all about the machine's identity and its sense of time.
Server name
The system hostname. It shows up in the shell prompt, in log lines, and in the
envelope of mail the server sends — which is the one that matters, because mail
from a host called ubuntu-2gb-nbg1-1 is treated differently from mail from a
host with a real name.
Letters, numbers, dots and hyphens, starting and ending with a letter or number, 64 characters or fewer.
Timezone
The clock every scheduled thing on this server follows. Change it and you change:
- when cron jobs run;
- when scheduled backups run;
- the timestamps in system logs;
- the hour a scheduled restart fires.
The picker is searchable and lists every zone grouped by region, with its current UTC offset. Now: below the field shows the server's local time in the zone selected, which is the quickest way to confirm you picked the right one.
UTC is a reasonable default for a server with users in more than one country — everything in the logs lines up, and nobody has to think about summer time. Pick a local zone when the humans reading the logs are all in one place.
Correct the clock automatically
NTP. Leave it on.
A clock that drifts makes scheduled jobs run late, log timestamps wrong, and TLS handshakes fail against servers that check validity windows closely.
If NTP is on but the clock has not actually synced, the panel says Not in sync rather than claiming everything is fine — a server whose NTP service is installed but blocked by a firewall looks healthy until you read that line.
Edit the fields you need. Saving is per section; nothing is applied yet.
Press Save server details. The hostname change takes effect immediately; the timezone change applies to jobs scheduled from that point on.
Caveats
- Renaming the server does not rename anything hosted on it. Applications, their domains and their system users are untouched.
- Changing the timezone does not reschedule a job to the same wall-clock time it had before — a cron job set for 03:00 now runs at 03:00 in the new zone.
- Needs Setting · Manage.