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For my user account I explicitly export the TZ variable to be america/chicago in my .bash_profile file, so when I type: date, I get the date in CST. However I have not set the TZ variable for any other user, and when they type: date, they get the date in CST as well, but the output of the command: timedatectl specifically says the timezone is UTC:

[tim etc]timedatectl Warning: Ignoring the TZ variable. Reading the system's time zone setting only.

 Local time: Tue 2018-07-17 18:15:53 UTC Universal time: Tue 2018-07-17 18:15:53 UTC RTC time: Tue 2018-07-17 18:15:52 Time zone: UTC (UTC, +0000) NTP enabled: yes NTP synchronized: yes RTC in local TZ: no DST active: n/a

How is it possible that users who don't have the TZ variable set to america/chicago are getting the america chicago output with the date command:

[tim etc]date Tue Jul 17 13:18:46 CDT 2018

I already checked this as well:
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 25 Mar 23 12:50 localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC

could it be related to the NTP enabled line? which is also confusing me, since I don't have the ntpd daemon running. This is a aws ec2 machine, if that helps
Thanks!

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A quick search online pointed to a timedatectl utility. It showed my VM lacking the time zone configuration,

$ sudo timedatectl Local time: Tue 2018-11-06 17:08:26 UTC Universal time: Tue 2018-11-06 17:08:26 UTC RTC time: Tue 2018-11-06 17:08:11 Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000) NTP enabled: yes NTP synchronized: no RTC in local TZ: no DST active: n/a

I checked the low-level system-wide timezone setting by inspecting the /etc/localtime symbolic link,

$ ls -la /etc/localtime lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 29 Jun 27 2017 /etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC

Then I set the time zone and inspected the result,

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'America/Toronto' $ sudo timedatectl Local time: Tue 2018-11-06 12:09:23 EST Universal time: Tue 2018-11-06 17:09:23 UTC RTC time: Tue 2018-11-06 17:09:07 Time zone: America/Toronto (EST, -0500) NTP enabled: yes NTP synchronized: no RTC in local TZ: no DST active: no Last DST change: DST ended at Sun 2018-11-04 01:59:59 EDT Sun 2018-11-04 01:00:00 EST Next DST change: DST begins (the clock jumps one hour forward) at Sun 2019-03-10 01:59:59 EST Sun 2019-03-10 03:00:00 EDT $ ls -la /etc/localtime lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Nov 6 12:09 /etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto

I guess I may have to reboot to get services aware about the new configuration.

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