google compute engine instances timezone changed to UTC automatically

google-compute-engine, timezone, virtual-machine

Solution

I've found a more user friendly approach here

Go root user

sudo -s

and use

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

This will bring up a GUI which will guide you to change your timezone information

Problem

I'm a new user of GCE instances. I created instances a week ago and changed timezone to Asia/Shanghai by commands below: cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Shanghai /etc/localtime Then yesterday, I found that my system timezone changed to UTC automatically and /etc/localtime was changed. So I run the command above agina. Until now it's OK. After that I checked many resources and export TZ='Asia/Shanghai'. But I still not know if it's the root cause or not. Also I find that someone adds xen.independent_wallclock=1 in sysctl.conf file to maintain independent times. But it's for Xen VM and I'm not sure if it's useful for GCE. Could anyone please take a look at it ?

Original source