Changing regional settings (locate, time zone, keyboard mappings) in CentOS 7 / RHEL

Quite often when deploying new instances of CentOS the process of setting regional settings like time is often hidden from the user behind the OS installer and more often than not it is not necessary to change these.

However this post will outline the steps that need to be taken if a server has been moved geographically or has simply not been configured correctly in the first place!

We'll start my changing the time zone - this is pretty straight forward and you can find timezone settings available to the system in:

ls -l /usr/share/zoneinfo/

In this case we'll use the GB (Great Britain) - by creating a symbolic link:

sudo rm /etc/localtime

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/GB /etc/localtime

We'll also ensure NTP is installed:

sudo yum install ntp && sudo service ntpd start

sudo systemctl enable ntpd OR chkconfig ntpd on

We'll also want to change the system locale - we can view the current one with:

locale

or 

cat /etc/locale.conf

and change it by firstly identifying locales available to us:

localectl list-locales

and then set it with:

localectl set-locale en_IE.utf8

or manually change locale.conf:

cat "en_IE.utf8" > /etc/locale.conf

and confirm with:

localectl status

Finally we need to change the key mappings - to view the current selection issue:

localectl list-keymaps

and then set with:

localectl set-keymap ie-UnicodeExpert