I don't really know why this is happening but when the server is booted, the date/time is always ahead of reality by a few hours, but it fixes itself after while. But this means my initial startup logs are written in the wrong sequence. This is a VM running under ESXi 6.7
For example, consider the following shell commands which I execute right after boot. The initial timestamps are all wrong until they are magically corrected a short time later. My timezones for root and all users are UTC.
DISTRIB_ID=UbuntuDISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammyDISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"user@server:~$ while true> do> date> sleep 1> doneThu Feb 22 12:21:03 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:04 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:05 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:06 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:07 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:08 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:09 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:10 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:11 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:12 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:13 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:14 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:15 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:16 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:17 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:18 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:19 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:20 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:21 AM UTC 2024Thu Feb 22 12:21:22 AM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:13 PM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:14 PM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:15 PM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:16 PM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:17 PM UTC 2024Wed Feb 21 07:38:18 PM UTC 2024