This morning I had a weird issue on one of my production boxes. I did a ‘date’ and noticed that the timezone was EDT, when it should be UTC. So I changed the timezone to UTC by:

rm -f /etc/localtime

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

Now when I did ‘date’, I still saw the timezone was EDT, when it should have been UTC. I was directed by the hosting company to reinstall the ‘tzdata’ package, so I did, and then redid the steps to change timezone:

yum reinstall tzdata

rm -f /etc/localtime

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

Now, when I do ‘date’, it shows the correct date/time.

Just wanted to put it out there in case anyone else has the same issue.