Question

Change Local Time Zone?

Hi there,

I acted before thinking this through. I was working in my WordPress (LEMP) site and noticed the time was off. Instead of making the Local Timezone fix in Settings > General as one normally does, I tried changing it through SSH.

This is my current configuration for $ timedatectl

                      Local time: Thu 2020-02-27 16:34:51 EST
                  Universal time: Thu 2020-02-27 21:34:51 UTC
                        RTC time: Thu 2020-02-27 21:34:52
                       Time zone: UTC (EST, -0500)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: no
                 RTC in local TZ: no

My WordPress General Settings now shows:

Universal time is 2020-02-27 16:28:00. Local time is 2020-02-27 16:28:00.

So, I’m guessing the (EST, -0500) for Time zone: UTC (EST, -0500) is coming from Local time.

When I check $ date it shows me the local EST time instead of the UTC that I’m looking for.

Despite how easy it was to mess this up, I can’t seem to undo the change.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

TIA!

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KFSys • February 27, 2020

Hi @aerynlynne,

The system timezone is configured by symlinking /etc/localtime to a binary timezone identifier in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. Alternatively, you can also check the current system’s timezone by displaying the contents of the /etc/timezone file.

cat /etc/timezone

There are a few possibilities to change the timezone. The first one is using timedatectl 

timedatectl list-timezones

You’ll something like

Europe/Oslo
Europe/Paris
Europe/Podgorica
Europe/Prague
Europe/Riga
Europe/Rome
Europe/Samara

Once you identify which time zone is accurate to your location, run the following command:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone your_time_zone

For example, to change the system’s timezone to Europe/Rome:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Rome ```

Run the timedatectl command to verify the changes

Regards,
KDSys