After setting up my automated upload to Dropbox cronjob in my last post I realized the timezone on my server was set to MSD or ‘Moscow Daylight Time’. That was causing some issues with my job since it was running at 5PM CDT instead of 2AM CDT.

[root@alderaan ~]# date
 Sat Jul 20 19:05:45 MSD 2013

No biggie. On a CentOS based system your timezone is determined by a symlink from /etc/localtime to the timezone data file appropriate for your region. Since my DotVPS server is hosted out of Chicago (CDT), you can change your timezone by creating a new symlink:

[root@alderaan ~]# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

Then check to make sure it worked:

[root@alderaan ~]# date
 Sat Jul 20 10:09:25 CDT 2013