I've been using server space on slicehost for quite some time to host some websites for family members with businesses and as a place for me to tinker. Even though it's been well over a year since I've had it, I'm ashamed to say I never bothered to set the time. Today I decided to fix it, but really didn't know how since my timezone appeared to be incorrect. First, I needed to figure out what version of ubuntu was running, so I used this command:

 
root@ezraxu:/home/george# lsb_release -a 
No LSB modules are available. 
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu 
Description:	Ubuntu 8.04.1 
Release:	8.04 
Codename:	hardy 

After a bit of searching, appears "tzconfig" is the common way to do this, but is not an option on this particular version of Ubuntu.  This forum led me to the command "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata".  This is an interactive application that allows you to set the timezone you're in (by the way, CST is GMT-6 - had to look that up too).  After setting the timezone I used "date" to set my time.  The format to use for setting the time using "date" isn't very straightforward.  It tells you how using the --help option, but I guess I just didn't understand it at first.  To set the time to '11/14/2010 2:40 PM' for example, I ran "date 111414202010.00".  Also, you'd probably figure this out anyway, but both of these commands require root access.