Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 102974
Changing timezone breaks /etc/localtime perms so UTC time is displayed instead
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:57:06 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: When travelling, I like to change my timezone to the local timezone. The bug is that when you run redhat-config-date as root, it updates /etc/localtime and changes the permissions to 600. Ordinary users can no longer read the file so all dates are displayed in UTC (unless you are root). You have to chmod /etc/localtime to 644 and then logout and back in again to get Clock, 'date', etc to display correctly. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): redhat-config-date-1.5.15-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Here is the process I use to do this and the resulting bug: 1. Using Clock 2.2.0.1 in my gnome panel, I right-click and go to "Adjust Date & Time..." 2. I'm prompted for the root password. 3. redhat-config-date starts and I select the new timezone. I am also using ntp, so the "Enable NTP" box is checked. 4. Click Okay, and the ntp server is contacted and then redhat-config-date exits. The Clock applet does not change to the local timezone. 5. Run the 'date' command and note that the date is displayed in UTC, not the old or new timezone. 6. Logging out and back in again causes the Clock applet to display the time in UTC. Actual Results: The date is displayed in UTC. Expected Results: The date should have been displayed in the local timezone. Additional info:
I'm confused. At first, you are talking about the file permissions on /etc/localtime getting changed to 600. I am not able to reproduce this behavior with redhat-config-date-1.5.15-2. For me, the ownership never changes from 644.
Resolving as 'worksforme'.
I am having the same problem with both redhat-config-date-1.5.15-1 and redhat-config-date-1.5.15-2. Only for root the 'date' command returns the time in PDT, regular users get the UTC version. The permissions on /etc/localtime are wrong (600).
I can confirm this bug. Changing /etc/localtime to 644 solves the problem. System is fully updated to rawhide as of 10/29/2003.
The problem is that /etc/localtime is created by redhat-config-date without changing permissions. If the umask is 022, no problem, but if the umask is 077, /etc/localtime does not get read permissions. When creating files, please do not rely on the umask. This time it was luckily not a security problem, just a loss of functionality. Unless the umask is 000, but nobody is that stupid. (I can't reopen this bug since I'm not the submitter.)
I am re-opening this bug. I didn't think of the umask, but I'm not making my umask be less secure just so I can change the date when I travel. I have learned to just chmod /etc/localtime as root when I get to a new timezone, but it would be a lot better for redhat-config-date to set the permissions explicitly.
The following code in timezoneBackend.py should force the umask on /etc/localtime to be 644: try: os.chmod("/etc/localtime", 0644) except OSError, (errno, msg): print (_("Changing permission of timezone: %s") % (msg)) Please reopen this bug if you see this behavior with system-config-date-1.7.2-1 in Rawhide.