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In some situations, reports in VoipNow display various time inconsistencies compared to the timezone of the location where VoipNow's web management interface is accessed. Although this behavior is not harmful, sometimes it can be annoying. On the other hand, VoIP calls can be affected by an incorrect timezone. This article will show you how to address this problem.

Step-by-step guide

Setting the timezone on the server

To do set the timezone on the server:

1. Log in to VoipNow's management interface and go to Unified Communications >> Timezone.
2. Select the timezone corresponding to your location. 
3. To ensure that what you see in the web interface is no different from what you see in the Linux shell console, run the date command. 

For example, if this is what you see in the interface:

Mar 14, 2016 15:45:52 UTC

This is what you should see in shell:

As you can see, the timezone is the same (UTC).

Keeping the time in sync with a NTP server

To keep the time in sync with a NTP server:

1. Run the following commands:

   Shell
   yum install ntp chkconfig ntpd on

   
   

2. Then sync the time using this command:

   Shell
   [root@voip~]# date Mon Mar 14 18:02:24 EET 2016 [root@voip~]# ntpdate pool.ntp.org 14 Mar 17:56:14 ntpdate[13182]: step time server 85.25.197.197 offset -373.379600 sec

   As you can see, there is a time lag of more than 6 minutes. This can cause issues with RTP streams, which can have out-of-order packets (poor audio quality).

   
   

3. Now, start the NTP server using this command:

   Shell
   service ntpd start

   
   

The server resources may be another reason for which time is not properly synchronized. This can happen especially when virtualization is used, and the resources of one server are shared between multiple servers. This can affect audio streams also, so it's important for resources to be properly reserved. For example, CPU and memory should have the minimum VoipNow requirements reserved.

In the case of dedicated servers, providers may limit the power usage, i.e. they may use only a limited number of CPUs (e.g. 4 instead of 8), which is making the server two times slower. 

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