Why does my system clock differ across services?

Question

I have my system clock set to UK time, which is currently +0100 (BST) I set this by symlinking the localtime file, as follows

/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London

However:

I run a few very similar servers, (CentOS 5 on a VPS) and have not had this problem before. What am I missing here?

Paweł Brodacki · Answer 1 · 2011-05-12 10:10:43Z

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You may have wrong locale settings in your environment. See what's the output of locale.

answered May 12 '11 at 10:10

	locale gives me this: `LANG= LC_CTYPE="POSIX" LC_NUMERIC="POSIX" LC_TIME="POSIX" LC_COLLATE="POSIX" LC_MONETARY="POSIX" LC_MESSAGES="POSIX" LC_PAPER="POSIX" LC_NAME="POSIX" LC_ADDRESS="POSIX" LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX" LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX" LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX" LC_ALL=` – Tim May 12 '11 at 11:28
	which is identical to another similar VPS that is working fine – Tim May 12 '11 at 11:30
	You definitely don't have the correct locale set then. I'd recommend setting it. As to the difference in time, you may add a line to MySQL script and a job to cron to see the output of locale from inside. If they are set to something other than POSIX, this would explain the difference. – Paweł Brodacki May 12 '11 at 11:53
	From a cronjob, I get the same output. – Tim May 12 '11 at 13:25
	I managed to fix MySQL by restarting. restarting cron didn't fix though. – Tim May 12 '11 at 13:26

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AlexD · Answer 2 · 2011-05-13 09:45:44Z

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Check presence of TZ environment variable. See man tzset for description of its format and how time zone info is defined.

answered May 13 '11 at 9:45

AlexD
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2 Answers