Australian timezone oddity between two similarly configured FC4 boxes

[Steffen Kluge]

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 04:29 +0000, Tim wrote:
> The behaving PC:
> [...]
> The non-behaving PC:
> [...]
> I can't see any difference betwen them.

Exactly my point. The tzdata package is fine. Problem is, it doesn't get
used under certain circumstances.

> Not sure what you're alluding to with the "RH9 FC4" bit?

I was trying to say that I see this issue on my RH9 and FC4 machines,
plus in fact, RH7 boxes as well.

> How do you read that TZ variable?  I tried something like echo $TZ, on
> both PCs, but it just prints a null string.

If TZ is set it has precedence. Normally (in Linux) everything relies on
the default in /etc/localtime, and the TZ env var is only used by users
that happen to login from different time zones. Or for testing (i.e.
when I want to know what time it is in N.Y. I say "TZ=US/Eastern date".

> Looking at the install dates for the tzdata RPM file, they *were* both
> within a few days of each other.  Although I just re-installed the
> tzdata file on the bad PC yesterday, it still has a much older date for
> that file than the good PC.

There is a surprisingly large number of updates to tzdata, just look at
the package's changelog. Although most people are rarely affected by
them I'm surprised that the issue hasn't come up earlier.

> Both my PCs:
> ll /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide
> -rw-r--r--  2 root root 785 Jan  9 20:16 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide
> 
> So *that* file, at least, seems to have been installed properly.

Yep, tzdata updates are prompt and correct.

> And I've just manually replaced /etc/localtime with a copy of the
> Adelaide file from /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/, and my PC is now
> serving time correctly (without the stripey suit with arrows on it).

The tzdata post-install script should have done that for you. The
necessary information (default time zone) is in /etc/sysconfig/clock. A
quick glance at the initscripts seems to indicate that /etc/localtime
never ever gets changed once written by the OS installer, or when you
change the default time zone. I wonder what you did to the PC that
didn't have the problem. Did you change the time zone setting on it
after 7-Sep-2005, causing a correct zone file to be copied
over /etc/localtime?

Cheers
Steffen.

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