KVM's time in crontab issue

frakass

Hello

I found my crontab works not correctly. It just follow the timezone in its physical host.
For instance, I specify the time zone to my location (EU), while the physical host is in USA.
Then my crontab won't follow the correct time to run, but use the time in USA timezone.

How can I fix this? I am using the VPS from a big platform from the US

Thanks

Liso

Can you describe how do you specify the time zone to my location, I think there's a misconfiguration. Mine works just fine and follows my local timezone (ID).

sibaper

how do you set the timezone?

I usually put the timezone before the crontab job
ex

TZ=Australia/Sydney

• • • • • my command

frakass

i setup this item in crontab:

0 0 * * * /home/xxx/bin/auto-backup.sh

But this item doesn't run at 00:00.
instead it run at 08:00 of my host time.
(So I was thinking my 08:00 is might be the physical host 00:00)

so how?

sanvit

For debian, you could try dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

jugganuts

Iv only noticed Cron issues in lxc lately, hope you solve your issue.

frakass

@sanvit said:
For debian, you could try dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

i already setup this to my timezone. I certainly won't setup it to the US TZ.

Pilotseye

That might sound wild, but you can do the conversion yourself and run the cronjob at the exact time within your US servers timezone to match your EU timezone

dahartigan

From memory there was a change a little while back with how cron handles the timezone.

FrankZ

Does
hwclock --show

show the same time as

date
?

EDIT: If they are not the same do
hwclock --systohc --localtime

frakass

@FrankZ said:
Does
hwclock --show

show the same time as

date
?

EDIT: If they are not the same do
hwclock --systohc --localtime

I have checked they are exactly the same. so my issue still exists.

jegh

@Pilotseye said:
That might sound wild, but you can do the conversion yourself and run the cronjob at the exact time within your US servers timezone to match your EU timezone

I don't think that's a good idea. The switch to daylight saving time is not synchronized between US and EU, so you will have 2 weeks in March and 1 week in November when the cronjob is off by 1 hour.

turdski

frakass

0 0 * * * /home/pyh/bin/auto-backup.sh

This still confused me. I setup crontab items as above, but the running time in log:

04/05/22 08:00:03 - data backup begin
04/05/22 08:08:04 - data backup end

They have 8 hours difference. any further idea?

JabJab

Have you restarted server or crontab daemon after you adjusted timezone?
If not - then it's still using old timezone, from the boot.

skorous

UTC

frakass

@JabJab said:
Have you restarted server or crontab daemon after you adjusted timezone?
If not - then it's still using old timezone, from the boot.

thanks a lot. after restarting crond the issue was resolved.