Setting up a new Vera Lite and cannot get the date to reflect correctly. The interface says " Your date/time will be automatically updated according to the timezone you selected" but it has not in over 24 hours. I am in the EST timezone (not sure why the interface does not reflect actual timezones) so I selected America > New York…but the date says Thursday Jan 1 1970. Does thing not have a way to set the date to what it actually is?
If Vera is connected to the Internet then it should get the current time from servers across the world using the rdate protocol. If your Vera isn’t doing this then it’s possible that rdate is blocked, either by your router or your ISP.
As a backup you can install another time-getting program onto the Vera, ntpclient. This uses a different protocol which might not be blocked.
You will need SSH access to Vera to run the commands listed here.
If you search the forum for “ntp” and “rdate” you will see how often this pops up.
To answer your questions: no, you can’t set the clock manually. And you have to select a city rather than a timezone because the Timezone Database contains historical data for UTC offsets, and once you take history into account, there are dozens of different ESTs (coughIndianacough). By picking a city, you are more likely to survive any future change legislated by your county or state. Time zones are Complicated.