On Tue 18 Jun 2024 at 04:12:07 (-0400), Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2024 at 4:05 AM <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 11:54:03PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > I notice that man timedatectl says:
> > >
> > > set-timezone [TIMEZONE]
> > > Set the system time zone to the specified value.
> > > Available timezones can be listed with list-timezones.
> > > If the RTC is configured to be in the local time, this
> > > will also update the RTC time. This call will alter
> > > the /etc/localtime symlink. See localtime(5) for more
> > > information.
> >
> > I cringe a bit when I see that.
>
> Yeah.. on Linux, it is recommended to keep the RTC clock in UTC.
> Unless Windows has contaminated the machine. See
> <https://wiki.debian.org/DateTime>.
Here's your subthread for discussing the RTC, as it's a separate
issue from the system's time zone.
Reading the link that Walton sent, the only case where RTC clock in UTC is recommended is in the linux/windows dual-boot case. There's no statement that RTC should be set to UTC besides that. And they say right there why it isn't mentioned: your Debian machine might move around geographically. But if it doesnt....
Servers in data centers don't move around, they just sit there :-) So in my experience servers running anything non-windows have RTC set to local time. That's been on Red Hat/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
(I believe I'm correct in saying that Windows has long been able,
by means of a registry key setting, to run with the RTC set to UTC.)
That is also my understanding but Windows 95 is the last release I've been an admin on.