Hey there!

I'm a US member, meaning that the clocks have just been adjusted up one hour since about a week ago. I am running a LAMP server and wanted to know what was the best way to change the time from the command line. I read a few things on google but they talked about UDC time vs time zone vs the computer resetting the time when you reboot. Since this is a public server I really don't want to reboot.

So what commands can I use to check the system time and adjust it ahead by one hour accordingly.

Thank you very much,

man date

Sometimes the man pages can be a little short on examples, so here is one....

Run the command: date -s "04/13/2005 19:38:00"

To set the date, just supply the date in the following format: MMddhhmm (assuming you have the correct year)
So right now, where I live, it's April 13 at 7:46 PM. To set the date I would run:
date 04131946

04 => April
13 => 13th
19 => 7 (PM)
46 => :46 (PM)

HTH

Ok, I type in "date" and according to the output, it's already set to the right time. Yet, all of my server programs think it's 1 hour behind. For example, phpBB and Wordpress think it's earlier, but

date gives me Thur 14 Apr 00:10am

You could run nntp and this updates the clock automatically, because your system syncs its time with another server on the internet.

don't have nntp -> get a command not found error when running as root. Any other suggestions?

Generally linux will keep track of time using Universal Mean Time (UMT), sometimes called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). By setting your time zone using the /etc/localtime symlink, or the TZ environment variable, your system reports time to you and your apps based on your local timezone. If you have it set up right, you never need to change the time for DST as it is done automagically. My guess is that when the server was started, the TZ variable reflected your non-DST timezone (and each running app has its own copy of the environment variables), but since then your settings have been updated to correctly reflect DST automatically.

You should try poking around there for a bit. You might get away with simply restarting the web service.

service httpd restart

or

service apache restart

or whatever your system uses.

Thats because its a service that you may have not installed. You need to install it and then enable it in services.

What about hwclock? Is this also reporting the correct time?

Thank you for all of the great info, and I now know how to set the date and time. However, I think I know what may be the problem. Since date is returning the proper time, I don't think it's a system problem. I think it has to do with the fact that the services I use (phpBB and wordpress) use an offset from GMT to determine the time. Since GMT doesn't have daylight savings, I'll have to fix it manually within each program by just setting it to be GMT -4 instead of -5 or something like that. At least that's what came to me this morning. I will have to test and see if I'm right.

Listen to jmajor! You don't need to manually tweak it for every application every half year.

What TZ has your shell? What do the applications use? (Look in /proc/$pid/environ.)
Probably your shell's is good.
(To find out what you should use, run 'tzselect'. It won't change any settings, just print a suggestion.)