I've seen a couple of posts that describe changing your timezone on a linux server. They seem unecessarily hard -- the latter requiring 8 steps.

Can anyone tell me how to change my server's timezone from CST to Los Angeles time? I've moved /etc/localtime to /etc/localtime-old and made a link to the Los Angeles time zone file:
and what I type 'date' it how shows the correct and current time in Los Angeles:
I'm worried about other daemons or processes that might be running which need to be informed of this change (e.g. cron jobs). I've had issues before where I changed the date but cron jobs kept running at the exact time as before i changed time zones. I'm also wondering what the hardware clock is and whether I need to also update that.

This all seems needlessly complicated IMHO. I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Hi there,

Why is this unnecessarily hard? Let's review the steps in the article you are referring to.

1: For ubuntu.... presumably you skipped this as you're not running Ubuntu
2: check which timezone your machine is currently using by executing `date`. You already done this if you know the timezone was CST...
3: Change to the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo here you will find a list of time zone regions. I guess you've done this too if you knew which file to link to
4: If you wish, backup the previous timezone configuration by copying it to a different location. You did this too :-)
5: Create a symbolic link to the appropriate timezone from /etc/localtime. and this...
6: If you have the utility rdate, update the current system time Not really important if you're comfortable that your time is accurate enough
7: Set the ZONE entry in the file /etc/sysconfig/clock file (e.g. "America/Los_Angeles") According to the 1st article you linked to, "Some applications may use the configuration file /etc/sysconfig/clock to determine the current time zone so it's a good idea to set the ZONE entry". I'd therefore perform this step too.
8: Set the hardware clock. Not really important i.m.o., as this is not relevant while Linux is up & running, and most distros will do this during shutdown

I share this concern. Cron is definitely a problem, and some other deamons (like ntpd) may also be. You could just restart the cron daemon to fix that particular issue. Personally I've always rebooted after a timezone change to ensure all deamons are refreshed correctly, as I don't know which others might be affected:-)

If you are using an Ubuntu system, they have a wiki page on this.

On a system with dpkg, you can generally just use the command line:
You may need to restart cron:
This last point would apply to any daemons that only read the timezone when they start.

The hardware clock is really only needed for startup/shutdown, and will be handled automatically. If you wish to update it, just use: