Yesterday I had to move a site that I wrote from LA to Paris. From redhat to debian. Overall not a bad experience. Debian is different but seems neither worse nor better than Redhat or Suse from what I can tell. apt-get is your friend. Why they felt that apache is a better name than httpd beats me.
Complex things go well and simple ones have surprises:
Changing the timezone back from Paris to LA I first ran tzselect.
That gave me the correct value. But then I had read on the web to change /etc/default/rcS. Which does not make sense to me: UTC is UTC is UTC. That’s what it’s there for. I then found /etc/timezone. I thought that would be it. Rebooted and, well, ssh
hash has changed. Interesting side effect. But still we were on the wrong time. Then I found that /etc/localtime was still (soft) linked to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris. After changing this to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles the date command gave me thee ‘right’ time. But apache/php still reported mod times of files in the old style. A second reboot fixed also that.