¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Once upon a time, my alpine linux VPS was located in Toronto (Canada). For a while now it’s been in Frankfurt (Germany).

Linode makes changing the location of your VPS a breeze. Recently though I realized I forgot to update the system timezone.

In the systemd world, we would do this:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin

And verify it with:

timedatectl show --property=Timezone --value

I appreciate the simplicity of timedatectl.

However, this is Alpine Linux, wherein we don’t say the s* word.

First, identify your desired timezone:

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo

We’ll go with Europe/Berlin. Symlink /etc/localtime to it:

doas ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime

In addition, update /etc/timezone:

echo 'Europe/Berlin' | doas tee /etc/timezone

That’s all.

For completeness you may want to reboot afterwards, but it’s not strictly necessary.