I've allocated a Cloud Server running Ubuntu at rackspace.com. The server was initially configured to be on UTC time. As I live in Los Angeles, this was a bit maddening when trying to determine what times cron jobs should run (this machine cooperates with another server in the United States). I therefore went through the trouble of changing the time on the server by doing this:
Now, when I type the date command on my server via ssh, it reflects the same time and timezone as my ubuntu desktop here in los angeles:
The problem is that I have a cron job set up to run at 23:00 hours (11pm) but it is running at 15:00 hours los angeles time. Unless I'm mistaken, that's equal to 23:00 UTC, right? Seems to me that somehow the cron jobs are unaffected by my date changes above and for some reason the times I specify in my crontab are still in UTC. WTF? How do I fix this?

Here's the crontab. This script fired off at 3pm california time today:

As it seems, this is not the system wide /etc/crontab but the user crontab, right? Since after editing this crontab I always get that message "installing new contab" it could be that something funny happened and you have to edit and save your file again with crontab -e.

However, I recommend to run your servers in UTC. I am running several servers in different places in the world, and I run them all in UTC. My desktops as well, and I only change the clock display on my desktop. The machine is in UTC.

I make regular mistakes, granted. But once I hit the wall again after such a mistake, it never, ever goes wrong regarding cron jobs, file synchronization, mail time stamps, whatever. I know it is awkward to calculate times back from UTC to local, especially when a date change is involved, but still at the end you see less mistakes. I am UTC-4, not as bad as UTC-7, still happy with this policy I choose a several years ago.

jlinkels

I think that happened following.
You said, that server was initially configured to use UTC. So when cron started time-zone was UTC.

Now, you reconfigured time-zone, and date command from the terminal uses and shows correct time-zone.

But cron still uses time-zone that was set on his start up.

So, re-starting cron should solve the problem.

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Restarting cron appears to have solved the problem:

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I'm having the same issue but with Amazon EC2 running Debian 6. I had previous scripts that worked on Debian 5 to the new box but they run at the wrong times. I set the server to be in the CST time zone by using dpkg-reconfigure tzdata. I checked under /etc/default/cron but there isn't any TZ syntax in there to specify the zone.

Is there any way to check if the cron is running on UTC? I rebooted the server and also restarted the cron service (/etc/init.d/cron restart) as well. Should I set the server back to UTC zone or run it with the specific time zone (CST)? I ran debian 5 and never had this issue, something must of changed in 6 that I'm not aware of.