I noticed something odd yesterday while reviewing log data on one of the RHEL 7 web servers I look after. Peering through the PHP error log, I noticed that all of the timestamps were formatted using the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC ... because acronyms that make sense are for losers). [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 511 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 530 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 574 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 607 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 629 There is nothing wrong with UTC. UTC avoids the calamities inherent in the highly politicized, frequently changed, deeply flawed and inevitably pointless Daylight Savings rules. And unlike epoch-based timestamps, UTC is human readable. It's good stuff. Your hwclock should use it. With that said, with this particular server a decision was made for logging to consistently be Eastern Time. So I jumped through a number of hoops to