Linux systems traditionally keep the definition of their timezone in /etc/localtime. This is a binary file with the timezone info, and if we want to change it we need to find the appropriate timezone file from /usr/share/zoneinfo and copy it over the one from /etc or just link to it. Once you change it, you will need to restart any daemons or applications that use the timezone as they might still use the old one.

Still on RHEL/Centos based systems this is not enough, and even if apparently all seems to work as expected, there might be some applications still using the old timezone. This is happening if they read the timezone definition from the rhel specific file: /etc/sysconfig/clock cat /etc/sysconfig/clock ZONE="America/Chicago" UTC=true ARC=false

We also need to update the ZONE field in /etc/sysconfig/clock to be sure that all occurrences of the old timezone are changed and everything on the system will use the new setting.

Note: you don’t need to restart the system to activate this change, but you will have to restart the applications using the timezone so they can read the updated information.