TL;DR: My raspberry pi won't automatically sync date and time. timedatectl doesn't run/times out, and upon further investigation, systemd-timesyncd has failed for some reason and cannot be restarted. I also don't have any error logs because the journal system refused to start on boot.
Recently when I booted up my Raspberry Pi, I noticed that the system time no longer syncs automatically. I have a WiFi internet connection. Going into system configuration and re-setting the timezone didn't help, but I was able to manually set the time and date (sort of).
It's also worth mentioning that, on boot, the journal service failed to start, I was also getting errors about No session for PID xxx, and the terminal was taking a ridiculously long time processing what sudo reboot meant (which, oddly enough, only happened the first time today I started the Raspberry Pi).
Based off of other posts, I found that running timedatectl was supposed to show the system time along with more information about auto time sync. However, I instead got:
Failed to query server: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.timedate1': timed out (service_start_timeout=25000ms)
I received the same error running timedatectl status. At this point I have rebooted multiple times with no avail. I know that my internet connection is working because I have other devices that are able to sync their time.
After looking around some more, I figured that systemd-timesyncd was one of the major components/services responsible for automatic time synchronization. I ran systemctl status system-timesyncd and received an interesting error message:
Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of systemd-timesyncd.service changed on disk. Run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload units
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: failed (Result: signal) since Sun 2021-12-19 18:15:43 CST; 3min 23s ago
Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)
Process: 1260 ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-timesyncd (code=killed, signal=ABRT)
Main PID: 1260 (code=killed, signal=ABRT)
(Note that this was after I manually set the time, but before, the Raspberry Pi was still stuck in October).
sudo systemctl daemon-reload executed without any errors, to my surprise, but still didn't resolve the previous issue.
I then ran systemctl restart systemd-timesync.service which gave me
Job for systemd-timesyncd.service failed because a fatal signal was delivered to the control process.
See "systemctl status systemd-timesynced.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
I took a look at journalctl -xe but there were no entries. As I mentioned before, this likely was because the journal refused to start at boot.
At this point I am at a loss of words. I tried rebooting, and I also tried restarting the time sync process itself. I appreciate anyone who is trying to help me with this, because it really is frustrating. Thanks again.
I wiped the disk and reinstalled raspberry pi