Hot Koehl » servers http://frankkoehl.com The more you know, the more you don't know Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:52:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Change timezone to GMT in Debian http://frankkoehl.com/2009/10/change-timezone-gmt-debian/ http://frankkoehl.com/2009/10/change-timezone-gmt-debian/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:25:39 +0000 Frank http://frankkoehl.com/?p=899 If you need to change the timezone of a Debian system, your searches will probably tell you to use the tzselect utility. That will only change the timezone for the server temporarily. Use that command and then run this: 

cat /etc/timezone

See how the timezone didn’t change? Left alone, the system will revert to the timezone stored in /etc/timezone at next reboot.

Plus, tzselect does not offer the full compliment of possible timezones. I recently needed to change my server to GMT, for example, and tzselect does not include an option for it.

Instead, Debian has a less-publicized tool that will solve both problems…

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Run that command and it will permanently change the timezone for the system, and includes options for all sort of obscure timezones. I wouldn’t consider GMT to be obscure, but maybe that’s just me.

Took me forever to find this searching earlier today. I don’t know why this isn’t more widely noted, but there you go.

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