Should servers have their timezone set to GMT/UTC? [closed]

Solution 1:

As with most things, "it depends".

• Are all of your administrators/users in the same timezone? Perhaps their TZ would be appropriate.
• Do the machines interact with the local environment? Local TZ might be good.
• Are all the logs pulled to a central location for analysis? UTC might help there.
• Do the machines communicate with each other in ways where time matters? UTC might help prevent silly mismatch issues.
• Does the OS vendor (more likely for network gear) have a suggestion? Consider that.
• Will DST annoy you? Use UTC.
• What do you think will make your life easier? Use that.

I've done all of the options (Local, UTC, arbitrary but consistent) and prefer the "local time to the home office for all machines" as that's where the sysadmins and users were, even though the machines were scattered all over the world.

Solution 2:

We set everything to GMT, it makes correlating log files across systems simpler.

But I think we should drop time zones, and all use GMT for everything.