TimeZone

[Shane Melson]

If your timezone is not set correctly, you may simply (or not) change it to the new timezone that you need. You can find out for sure what your timezone is by typing: "clock" at the command line. The output should be something similar to:

Sat 10 Apr 2004 10:16:00 AM EDT -0.125188 seconds


You will notice directly after the time (10:16:00 AM EDT) in this case that we are running Eastern Daylite Time. If you want to change it to something different, you have to update the file in /etc/localtime which is your timezone file. In older systems, this file is a symbolic link to another file, however we've found that on newer systems, an actual file exists here.

Here's what to do. First, cd follow these commands:

#cd /usr/share/zoneinfo
#ll


You should see a list of files that are broken down by country. In our case, we want to change our timezone to Central Daylight Time, so we are going to cd into Americas, make a backup of our original time file and then copy the new one to the location.

#cd /usr/share/zoneinfo/America
#cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-orig
#cp Chicago /etc/localtime


Next, we should bump our time against a time server and get everything set properly. The following commands will sync your system clock to a time server (time.nist.gov) and then sync your hardware clock to your system clock.

#/usr/bin/rdate -s time.nist.gov
#/sbin/hwclock --systohc


Now check your time. clock

The output should now read:

Sat 10 Apr 2004 10:18:00 AM CDT -0.125188 seconds
Keeping the Clock Up to Date