changing hwclock's timezone

[John Schmidt <john.andrew.schmidt@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I have a friend whose time is being reported incorrectly with the date command 
and the hwclock command.  Both commands are reporting the commands in UTC 
instead of the eastern timezone.  He just installed ntp on his box.

His /etc/timezone is 

	America/New_York


The output of the date and hwclock commands:

sh-3.1# date
Wed Dec 12 21:52:41 UTC 2007
sh-3.1# date -u
Wed Dec 12 21:52:46 UTC 2007
sh-3.1# hwclock
Wed 12 Dec 2007 04:22:58 PM UTC  -0.780500 seconds


On my debian boxes, the hwclock reports the time using my timezone.  I am 
guessing that the problem was the use of UTC instead of EST.  I tried to have 
him adjust the hwclock, but couldn't get the right syntax.

So the questions are:

1.  Would manually setting the time via the date command to something close to 
the correct time fix things so that ntp would eventually sync things up, 
since the time difference is too big for ntp to work?

2.  Do I have to set the time via the hwclock?  If so, how do I do that?

I didn't have him check the bios to see what the time is reporting there.

Thanks,

John Schmidt