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Does having Server time differ from local time cause issues?
beanman109
Member, Host Rep, Megathread Squad
in Help
Pretty much question in the title.
If I have a VPS in the US & set the time of the server to my local time in Australia, will it break things? Or does UTC account for that?
Comments
UTC is the same everywhere. You might get confused if the server's timezone is wrong for you (although I just leave mine however it gets installed by default, depending on provider's template, except for the couple of machines I actually use for interactive things).
If you have the wrong timezone, you can change it in /etc/timezone.
That's sort of what I assumed - with it being universal and all.
I just know from experience system time drift can cause all sorts of issue but I guess that's more related to the UNIX timestamp being the same.
Yeah, time drift is important. If you're doing things across multiple servers where timestamps are important, make sure you run ntpd. But otherwise localtime is generally just used for presentation. Internally, it's all seconds from 1/1/1970 0:0:0 UTC and converted from that to something else to show to users.
It's mostly cosmetic and more important for time correlation. I setup a Cyberpower VM to send notifications for UPS issues. It requires timezone file to be manually copied as requirement. However, the timestamps used in Notifications is UTC (and doesn't even say UTC) and fucking useless and means I need to check the email timestamp instead.