Cron jobs running in UTC timezone on Virtuozzo 4.0 containers
Symptoms / etc / crontab showed that cron . daily should be running at 05:08 in the morning, but a grep of the syslogs showed that it was running at 18:08 at night. # grep daily / etc / crontab 8 5 * * * root test -x / usr / sbin / anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report / etc / cron . daily ) # grep daily / var /log/ syslog . 0 Mar 25 18:08:01 vps /USR/SBIN/CRON [ 8110]: (root) CMD (test -x / usr / sbin / anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report / etc / cron . daily )) The 'date' command showed the right timezone. # date Tue Mar 26 16:56:00 NZDT 2013 Cause / etc / timezone was malformed by having the the local timezone appended, instead of overwritten, in the final stages of customisation by Virtuozzo, when the container was installed. # cat / etc / timezone Etc /UTC Pacific/Auckland Solution Removing the bogus "Etc/UTC" line from / etc / timezone fixed the problem.