Appliance Timezone Mismatch

The nightly appliance status check can report a timezone mismatch between your app host and your appliance host. This article explains the error, its root cause, and how to fix it.

Error text:

Nightly appliance status check failed:
- Appliance's timezone is different than application's timezone.
- Appliance's database timezone is different than application's database timezone.

What the Check Compares

Ubersmith (the app host) and the appliance (a separate host) each report their own PHP timezone and database session timezone. The nightly check compares these four values:

On the appliance side, one TIMEZONE environment variable drives both the PHP timezone and the forced SET @@session.time_zone on every database connection. Fixing that one variable resolves both bullet points in the error at the same time.

Root Cause

You do not set TIMEZONE directly. The installer generates it automatically by reading each host's /etc/localtime at install or upgrade time, separately for each host:

• App host: written into docker-compose.override.yml
• Appliance host: written into appliance-docker-compose.override.yml

These are two independent reads on two different machines. They can drift out of sync, especially when:

• the two hosts were provisioned at different times,
• one host's system timezone changed after install,
• someone hand-edited an override file on one host but not the other, or
• an upgrade ran.

Steps to Fix

1. On the app host and the appliance host, confirm what /etc/localtime resolves to:

   readlink -f /etc/localtime

2. On each host, open its override file and check the TIMEZONE: value:

• App host: docker-compose.override.yml
• Appliance host: appliance-docker-compose.override.yml

2. Make the two TIMEZONE values match. Edit whichever file is stale or incorrect so both hosts declare the same zone (for example, America/New_York).

3. Recreate the affected containers on whichever host you edited, so the new environment variable and the /etc/localtime bind-mount take effect:

   docker compose up -d --force-recreate

Run this on the host whose override file you changed. If both files were wrong, run it on both hosts.