Changing timezone in Linux

The timezone in Linux is defined in the file /etc/localtime. To change this setting you should modify the contents of this file to reflect the desired zone information. By default, the operating system will keep the zone information files for all timezones under /usr/share/zoneinfo. To set a timezone, you can either copy the file as /etc/localtime or link /etc/locatime to the target file. The preferred method is to use soft links.

I will show you how I changed the timezone in my server from PDT to IST.

Current date and timezone:

[root@www ~]# date
Sat Aug 9 09:32:11 PDT 2008
[root@www ~]# ls -l /etc/localtime
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Aug 2 07:15 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles

As you can see, the timezone of the system is PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) . Now I want to change this to Indian Standard Time (IST). So I am going to change the link to /etc/localtime. My timezone file will be at the location /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta.

[root@www ~]# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta /etc/localtime
[root@www ~]# date
Sat Aug 9 22:10:23 IST 2008
As you can see, the timezone is IST now.

VPS hosting @ Linode.com

It is one week since I signed up for the Linode VPS package. So far so good is my impression about their service. It is a very short time to evaluate a hosting service. Especially as I am running only a couple of low traffic websites on top of apache. But still I should say something about my initial experience.

The signup process was very quick. After I filled up my personal details, I got a mail with a link to continue signup process. I filled up remaining information - my choice was the basic package, Linode 360 for 19.95$ PM. Immediately afterwards I got an invoice mail followed by a payment receipt. Five more minutes and I got the account activation mail. All these took only ten minutes. I logged into the control panel (Linode manager), set my root password, partitioned the hard disk and installed a CentOS image. Within twenty minutes my server was up and running. Now that is cool, right? Your own server in thirty minutes. I was really impressed.

I will post some features of linode manager soon.