RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

/etc/sysconfig/clock is not accessed during boot.  The file does nothing.  It's confusing, and should either be removed or replaced with some documentation.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

I chose "basesystem" because I can't find any more suitable component.

$ rpm -qf /etc/sysconfig/clock 
file /etc/sysconfig/clock is not owned by any package

... but it seems to exist on all RHEL6-machines I've checked at (as well as some derivative distributions).

How reproducible:

Always

Steps to Reproduce:
0. grep -r /etc/sysconfig/clock /etc/rc* /etc/init.d
1. Make sure atime is turned on the root file system
2. reboot
3. stat /etc/sysconfig/clock 

Actual results:

* No references to /etc/sysconfig/clock when grepping for it
* /etc/sysconfig/clock is not accessed during boot

Expected results:

File should be referenced from one of the init scripts, it should be accessed during boot, or it shouldn't exist at all if it's obsoleted.

I got told that although /etc/sysconfig/clock is not used by RHEL, there may be legacy applications depending on this one, notably tomcat - http://grokbase.com/t/tomcat/users/051m0s38p2/how-to-change-the-timezone-for-tomcat#20050120zlgufj6cgdsma7i2olrgcpwia4 - although on my RHEL/Tomcat hosts /etc/localtime seems to be respected.

If the file has to exist for backward-compatibility with legacy apps, I suggest to at least add a comment of explanation in the file.

Thanks for report, basesystem is definitely wrong, use distribution component when you are not sure what is responsible for this. In that case, AFAIK anaconda is creating the file, reassigning there.

This request was not resolved in time for the current release.
Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to
propose this request, if still desired, for consideration in
the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Thanks for the bug report.  We have removed writing out this file from later versions of anaconda, so this will be fixed in RHEL-7.  See bug 859217.  If you require this fix in an update release of RHEL-6, please go through your support representation who will raise the issue for planning purposes.  Thanks again.