How Do You Change the Time Zone to the Eastern Time Zone of the U.S. With a CentOS 6.X Server?

Problem scenario
You run the date command on Linux and find that your server is not configured for the Eastern time zone and/or the ntp daemon is not running. What should you do?

Solution
Run these commands:

sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/ntpd start
ls -l /etc/localtime
sudo cp /etc/localtime /root/old.timezone
sudo rm /etc/localtime
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/American/Boston /etc/localtime
sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

This solution was adapted from this external posting.