It does not make any change to the time zone setting of the system. It interactively prompts the user with questions about the system’s location, and outputs the name of the correct time zone. The command tzselect is useful for identifying correct zoneinfo time zone names. For example, in the USA, much of the state of Arizona (US Mountain time) does not have a daylight saving time adjustment at all and is in the time zone America/Phoenix.

Selecting the correct name can be non-intuitive in cases where localities inside the time zone have different daylight saving time rules. For example, most of the US Mountain time zone is America/Denver. Time zones are named based on continent or ocean, then typically but not always the largest city within the time zone region. Time zone names are based on the public time zone database that IANA maintains. ~]$ timedatectlĪ database of time zones is available and can be listed with the timedatectl list-timezones command. The timedatectl command shows an overview of the current time-related system settings, including current time, time zone, and NTP synchronization settings of the system.

A high-quality hardware clock to serve accurate time to local clients is another option. A machine may get accurate time information from public NTP services on the Internet, such as the NTP Pool Project. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a standard way for machines to provide and obtain correct time information on the Internet. Correct synchronized system time is critical for log ﬁle analysis across multiple systems.

Change timezone linux centos