If you have a server that is built out the box (OOB) with Windows Server installed (or any OS for that matter) and you click though the setup without changing anything, even if your server is located in the UK, you will get a server that thinks its in the USA
You will get a server build based on the regional settings from the manufacturer with is Microsoft, this means if you build the server as a USA server using the MM/DD/YYYY format then you will run into issues, mainly the clock will be an hour behind your current time.
This is down to the reason that if the region is USA and the time zone is UTC, then UTC for the USA is UTC+0 - the UTC time zone does not support DST, DST or Daylight Saving Time - is that silly idea where the clocks go back in winter and forward in summer.
You will also notice your DST option for the GUI people will be greyed out:
However this means as UTC in a USA region you will be -1 hour behind actual time, to fix this start a command prompt as an administrator, then run the command
tzutil /l
This will give you a list of all the timezone you can use, you are looking for this one:
(UTC+00:00) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London
GMT Standard Time
Not to be confused with this:
(UTC) Coordinated Universal Time
UTC
You then seem to set this time zone like this, if you get an error then you are not an admin my friend:
tzutil /s "GMT Standard Time"
When you set this, for all the GUI people, you will also notice that the DST option is available once again:
If you option for DST is still disabled after these step, you may need to do this:
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation
- Locate the key DynamicDaylightTimeDisabled
- Set key to 0 (from 1)
When you set this time zone DST will automatically be turned on and your clock will once again be correct, however if you would like to turn off DST (so your clock stays on winter time) use this:
tzutil /s "GMT Standard Time_dstoff"
Please do not set a time zone as UTC+1 this will cause issues elsewhere, and also remember this issue will only be a problem while in summer time, in winter time we are not the +1 known as DST.
Finally remember when getting event logs that are in UTC the entries will be -1 hour from your clock time, so an event at 14:00 GMT will be 13:00 UTC.