Changing Server Timezone On Ubuntu

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This is another one of those "I know this, but I can never remember how" type things.

I'm currently reconfiguring a machine on the other side of the globe, so I want to get it to work to IST instead of EST.

A quick google brought up a rather complex way of doing it which sounded really wrong to me, so I refined my query and found the sane solution in the Ubuntu documentation.

Simply run the following command as root (or using "su"):
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

And just follow the instructions.

No silly reboots or other craziness required.

To keep your server's time in sync with the rest of civilisation setup a cronjob to poll an ntp server once every 24 hours:
 /usr/sbin/ntpdate yourfavouritentpserveraddress

Problem solved :)


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4 Comments

tzconfig does the job too.

Nice tip. Last time I did that I went editing files in /etc/

@Steve - I'd forgotten about that option

@Donncha - that would fall into the "in"sane type of solution in my book :)

"To keep your server's time in sync with the rest of civilisation setup a cronjob to poll an ntp server once every 24 hours:"
The Tardis hurt Trinity hard in that we had to push those requests off into /null
Have a look at
/etc/ntp.conf
Ubuntu knows about this ...you are not the 1st.
http://www.pool.ntp.org/
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This page contains a single entry by Michele Neylon published on March 17, 2008 6:12 PM.

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