When you get one of our Accelerators you'll notice that the time is in GMT:

$ date
Thu Nov 16 22:24:27 GMT 2006

That can be really really annoying. I don't know about you but I just can't think in GMT. But the solution is simple. Simply set the TZ variable in your profile (.bash_profile, .bashrc, .profile, depending on what shell you prefer):

$ date
Thu Nov 16 22:26:39 GMT 2006
$ export TZ="PST8DST"
$ date
Thu Nov 16 14:26:50 PST 2006

The use of this variable is really handy, especially if you've got one developer in Europe, another in California, and another in New York.

Alternatively, if you want to simply change the default timezone for your entire accelerator, edit /etc/TIMEZONE and change the TZ variable there.

You can find a complete list of all the timezones supported by Solaris (which is a lot!) in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo. You specify the file path relative to that directory, so if you want Hong Kong you'd use “Asia/Hong_Kong”, if you wanted EST you'd use “EST”.

$ export TZ="Asia/Hong_Kong"
$ date
Fri Nov 17 06:33:57 HKT 2006

After changing the /etc/TIMEZONE file you will need to reboot your accelerator.

# reboot