Comments on How To Change The Date And Time From The Console

I like to use the natural language method

 date -s "July 20 2010 08:20"

i prefer to use ntpd which sets your system relative to greenwich mean time.

I think setup command is easy to solve this problem

 install: yum install setup

I use: date -u mmddhhmm (with the aid of an atomic watch), i.e. which sets the UTC time, and local time is resolved by locale (previously setup) as follows:

# setup local timezone
rm /etc/localtime
# setup for EDT and EST (+4 EDT; +5 EST)
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime
# setup for only EST (+5 EST)
#ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime
rm /etc/timezone
echo "US/Eastern" > /etc/timezone
export TZ="/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York"

After setting, sink your hardware time with this command:

 # hwclock -w

After google around, a more specific version is available here:

http://planet.admon.org/howto/set-timezone-date-and-time-in-linux/

It also helps me fix the time issues in a virtualized private server, enjoy :)