Linode

Trying to set the system time in Webmin caused the following error:

hwclock failed :

The linode I was running did not expose an hwclock interface. The solution was to simply set the timezone thus:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

/usr/share/zoneinfo  contains a number of different timezone files  which you could use. 

# date
Fri Jun 18 13:44:18 UTC 2010