FW: tzdata question

Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov
Wed Apr 14 18:00:59 UTC 2010


I'm forwarding this message from Bob German, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately.

         --ado
________________________________________
From: bobgerman at bobgerman.com [bobgerman at bobgerman.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 1:29 PM
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Subject: tzdata question

Hello,

I hope this is the right place for this question.  A coworker
suggested filing a bug report, but I'm not confident enough in what
I'm seeing to do so.

I recently updated two servers from CentOS 5.2 to 5.4.  In the
process, of course, the tzdata package was updated.  Shortly after
updating, my boss began barking about a server with the wrong timezone
showing up in our logging.  He's very uptight about that sort of
thing.  We log everything with UTC religiously because we have servers
all over the planet.

Further investigation revealed that on these two particular servers,
which had been updated with CentOS 5.4 (and the tzdata package), we
could NOT change the time by the usual means (rm /etc/localtime; ln -s
/usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime).  This works everywhere else
in our datacenters, so we were confused.  Upon looking closer, it
appears the UTC file installed by the latest tzdata package is not a
UTC file.  Running strings on it reveals EST5EDT.

I don't know if this is a problem at the source, or a packaging
problem somewhere along the stream.  I'm sending it to this email
address because this is what I found in the README for the tzdata
package.  Please feel free to correct me in any way that will help me
stop my boss from barking, as this is every information technologist's
duty in life.

Thank you for your brain cycles.





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