Fresh install have wrong ownership /var/log/chrony

I noticed the time was off on one of my newest laptops so I was investigating as to why - so I went looking for a reason.

I was looking at errors in journalctl and spotted an error saying it was unable to update /var/log/chrony/drift

It was owned by scard and group pulse not chrony chrony - as was /var/log/chrony. So I fixed them - that fixed the time issue.

All three of the newest installs of 15.2 were this way. My new install of Tumbleweed was correct as well.

The upgraded from 41.0 to current 15.2 over the years installs had the correct chrony chrony for the owner and group as well.

You might check to see if that yours have the correct permissions on your 15.2 installs.

I used the 07/07/2020 DVD download of 15.2 dd’ed to a USB drive and enabled the network when I did the installs on April 28.

Both are Dell 7490 and cannot boot Legacy from the internal drives so they are UEFI.

3 partitions - 1 512mb fat16 efi - 1 33gb swap and rest of the drive ext4 /

Good investigation, only a new install of 15.2 does give the wrong ownership of /var/log/chrony

Tried to see where that comes from:


$ wget https://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.2/repo/oss/x86_64/chrony-3.2-lp152.12.1.x86_64.rpm
$ rpm -qlpv chrony-3.2-lp152.12.1.x86_64.rpm | grep '/var/log/chrony' 
drwxr-x---    2 chrony   chrony                      0 Jun 10  2020 **/var/log/chrony**

So it is not clear to me where the problem is originating.

As I read this, this looks like a confirmed bug in the package. A bug report seems to be the way forward.

May I observe that on an older 15.2 as well as on an install of 15.3 (about 10 days old) there is no /var/log/chrony/drift and /var/log/chrony is owned on both machines by chrony:chrony (although chrony is running according to YaST and htop)…

The default location for the chrony drift file is ‘/var/lib/chrony/drift’ –


 # grep -i 'drift' /etc/chrony.conf 
driftfile /var/lib/chrony/drift
 # 
 # l /var/lib/chrony/
insgesamt 12
drwxr-x---  2 chrony chrony 4096  6. Mai 18:06 ./
drwxr-xr-x 73 root   root   4096 23. Mär 10:14 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 chrony chrony   42  6. Mai 18:06 drift
 # 

On the 15.3 and the older 15.2 both /var/lib/chrony/drift and the directory have the correct ownership here…