Unable to change the time zone on vCloud Director appliance

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to change the system time zone of a vCloud Director appliance after it has been deployed successfully. All appliances in the vCloud Director server group must use the same settings.

Symptoms:
Selecting the Set Timezone function from the appliance's welcome screen reports the following error:

/usr/bin/tzselect: line 180 /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone1970.tab No such file or directory
/usr/bin/tzselect time zone files not setup correctly

Environment

VMware Cloud Director for Service Provider 9.5.x

Cause

This issue occurs due to an error in the tzdata package.

Resolution

Currently, there is no resolution.

Workaround:
To work around this issue:

1. Log in to the console of each cell in the vCloud Director appliance-based server group.
2. Determine what time zones are available by browsing the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory and sub-directories.

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/

The directories might reveal an available time zone.

Example:

America/Los_Angeles

3. Set the new time zone by running the following command. Substitute a time zone that you found when browsing the directories.

Example:
/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_set_timezone_cmd America/Los_Angeles