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.

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