[RndTbl] minor DST problem with Red Hat/Fedora "legacy" systems

John Lange john.lange at open-it.ca
Wed Mar 14 12:11:37 CDT 2007


Just out of curiosity; is your system clock set to UTC?

When the system time changed, the processes on some machines seem to
have picked up the time change no problem while on other machines the
processes had to be restarted or the machine rebooted.

I'm just trying to figure out why that would be the case?

Anyone have any ideas?

As a side question; why the heck are the timzone files in a binary
format? Wouldn't life be much easier if they were just plain text?

John

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 11:43 -0500, Gilles Detillieux wrote:
> If you're still running Red Hat or Fedora Linux systems that were being 
> updated by the Fedora Legacy project before it was shut down, you should 
> have received the tzdata update last year to correct the Daylight Saving 
> Time switchover for this year.  However, the updates from 
> fedoralegacy.org only installed the new /usr/share/zoneinfo files, but 
> didn't update /etc/localtime from that.  (On RH/FC systems, 
> /etc/localtime is a copy of the appropriate zoneinfo file, not a 
> symbolic link.)
> 
> What I found is that for these systems (RH9, FC1-3), I needed to do the 
> following:
> 
>      cp -p /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Winnipeg /etc/localtime
> 
> After that, I either rebooted the system, or restarted these services: 
> syslog, crond, xinetd, sendmail, httpd.  FC4 updated itself 
> automatically last spring, so as long as you rebooted since then, the 
> DST change should have happened without a snag.  FC5-6 had the changes 
> at release time.
> 
> I also managed to update a very old Red Hat 6.2 system by copying the 
> zoneinfo file from a Red Hat 9 system updated by fedoralegacy.
> 
> Just thought these tips might be of help if you're supporting legacy 
> linux boxes.




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