Manually set date in Ubuntu LXC container

[mervin]

Hi there,

Is it possible to manually set the time inside an Ubuntu LXC container? I have a use case where it's necessary to temporarily override the date.
I know dpkg-reconfigure tzdata works however in this specific case I would like to set the date ahead of today.
I've tried timedatectl and the date command to no avail. The message I get for example is 'date: cannot set date: Operation not permitted'
I've also tried this on a privileged test container to see if that would make a difference, but it didn't.

I know the time is synced with the host but is this possible at all?

Thank you in advance!

 

[shanreich]

Aside from setting a different timezone than the host, I'm afraid it is not possible to change the system time. You could use faketime though, which enables you to set a specific date/time for a process [1].

[1] https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/faketime.1.html