I've just commissioned a new Debian 10 server. Two oddities which may be related (or not).

All my Debian 10 systems until now put date as follows:
# date
Thu 16 Jan 15:25:21 GMT 2020

The new system ouputs:
# date
Thu 16 Jan 2020 03:25:59 PM GMT

The other oddity is that cron jobs on new system execute an hour earlier than requested.


My first thought was 'locale' but both are identical:
# cat /etc/default/locale
# File generated by update-locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

I checked the Time zone, again both identical:
timedatectl
Local time: Thu 2020-01-16 15:30:15 GMT
Universal time: Thu 2020-01-16 15:30:15 UTC
RTC time: Thu 2020-01-16 15:30:16
Time zone: Europe/London (GMT, +0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: inactive
RTC in local TZ: no


Research here and elsewhere is how to display time in different formats but silent so far on how 'date' finds its default format which, as you can see differs.

Anyone?

Have a look a this thread https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ux-4175605092/

Maybe the cron daemon does not use the same timezone as you use as a user?
I would check the difference between your timezone and UTC.

Any chance of cheating?
have cron fire off echo $(date) > to a file, and see what time it thinks it is when it fires? Assuming that cron daemon has been restarted as well. What time is it showing in syslog/messages?

also is this a crontab, or a cron residing in /etc/cron.d/ ?

One down, one to go ...

The cron offset is sorted. It had clearly not picked up the shift in timezone so a cron restart fixed it. Which leaves the more intriguing issue of the different date default formats. As a reminder:

user@A:~# date
Thu 16 Jan 18:28:24 GMT 2020

user@B:~# date
Thu 16 Jan 2020 06:30:17 PM GMT

That is 24hr v AM/PM and the position of the year. These are both brand new Debian 10 VPS from the same provider. All my other Debian 8/9/10 servers show system A format. So how does date determine it's default format and what could have screwed system B?

A free operating system for the first right answer

see man locale and man date. [Most] probably the variable LC_ALL was set differently. But you need to check your environment and find the differences.

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Aha! It's our friends across the pond who dunnit!

locale gave:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

a quick export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 got it sorted. Thanks.

Well not quite - when I logout it reverts to its American ways ... must try harder.

Do you set locale in bashrc or profile or any of the files they source?

Yes. /etc/profile.d/lang.sh on my desktop, but search through all the files in /etc/profile.d

All sorted. A quick dpkg-reconfigure locales got it to stick.
I usually use that to make the server speak proper English - but yesterday used another method which would work if your American but not if you're British.

Well that's it. All cosmetic really but annoying when you have a new server humming nicely. Learning point is to put dpkg-reconfigure locales on my ToDo list instead of 'change language'.

Thanks again and good night.

if you really want to say thanks just click on yes.
If your problem is solved please mark the thread solved.
May I get that OS ?

1 members found this post helpful.

It's in the post and i'll still love you in the morning