CRITICAL LUCEE ISSUE — For anyone using Lucee, I'd recommend disabling the "use time server" function and instead relying on keeping your server's clock synchronized. We ran into an issue Sunday night where Lucee was incorrectly reporting times as being just after midnight of Jan 1, 1900. What did not make sense is that all of our system logs had the correct timestamps, it was just the times that Lucee was reporting which were incorrect. It turns out the root cause of this issue was due to the fact that by default, Lucee enables the "use time server" setting (Admin > Settings > Regional) and uses

<http://pool.ntp.org|pool.ntp.org>

as the time server. Unfortunately, the response that

<http://pool.ntp.org|pool.ntp.org>

was returning was forcing Lucee to interpret the value as "0", which was making the Lucee clock reset to Jan 1, 1900. So if you have this feature enabled and are using the default time server (pool.ntp.org), I'd recommend checking the timestamps on your application as you may have some issues. You can read more about the problem here: https://cfml.slack.com/archives/C06TA0A9W/p1719928636716069

So something changed with Lucee causing this or something changed with NTP’s value?

@micha can offer more insight, but from my understand the pool.ntp.org server was returning an unexpected result, which was causing Lucee to interpret the value as

0

. If you absolutely need this functionality, then perhaps using a different NTP server would prevent the issue, but I'd argue that Lucee should just be synched with the OS and just let the OS manage the clock.

Yea that NTP config in Lucee is a default setup, so folks need to be making a change or Lucee needs to set that up to allow for failover method or some sort of detector if something drastically changes about the time in a X-timespan like 5min jumps hundred+ years heh

It sounds like Lucee may just remove the feature in the near future, which makes sense to me. I"m not sure why you're want the clock to be different than the system clock. I get wanting to use a differen time zone, but not have the clock value different.

yea I agree…not sure why thats a thing. My best guess would be that you are house on a VM in Germany (cheaper hosting for example) but you want your Lucee VM to say that it is USA or something to that

Do you know when Lucee added this setting? Has it always been there?

I'm not sure when it was added. I believe it's been there for a long while (since at least Lucee 5)

Has anyone posted this issue to the Lucee Dev forum? https://dev.lucee.org/ These messages in Slack get removed fairly quickly. I think it would be a good idea to post over there for a more permanent location if someone is searching for an answer in the future.

Yea that feature has been there for ages @seancorfield

Thanks. Then I guess I'm glad we're migrating from Lucee to BoxLang...

@seancorfield -- that option has been there since early in the Ralio days. ACF and BD also allowed you to set the time server as well. I remember we had one customer who needed to match the time exactly with one of the DB servers, versus what their shared host was set to.

Ah, shared hosting... yeah, I can see it being useful for that... we have our (virtual) hosts all set to UTC at the O/S, we have our databases configured to run as UTC, and all our JVMs startup with UTC.

It was more that the DB was syncing off a different time source that was slightly different than what the host was (times were all UTC, but the times were purposefully off by like 2-3 minutes, which mattered).