Interconnected systems - the importance of a run book

I haven’t had amazing luck with hosting providers. After moving my main system over to a new host about 8 months ago, things have been running pretty smoothly, except, today I searched one of my databases for something that should have been captured, and it wasn’t there. I’ve been monitoring the  status reports generated by the automated capture process, and everything seemed fine ... Except it wasn’t capturing documents updated at the last minute, as this one was. Even though I’d coded it to do so.

The culprit: The new VPS was set to eastern time, and this process was time-sensitive to a certain window local time. I tweaked the crontab entry and changed the local timezone:

# timedatectl set-timezone America/Los_Angeles

Problem solved, but I should have caught it earlier. Need to gather up all my random notes and documentation snippets into a runbook. The sort of thing you forget to do when you haven’t worked professionally in IT in over a decade and just dabble on your personal systems. I know better.