Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 123101
ZONE is not used for anything
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:42 EST
Description of problem: It looks like ZONE set in /etc/sysconfig/clock is not really used by any init scripts. This leads down a fun trail of chasing a problem which shouldn't really exist. It turns out that the authorative file for the system time zone is actually /etc/localtime. Manual replacement is required in case the time zone changes on a particular system. It would be nicer if the value from ZONE was used to copy the timezone file to /etc when starting up. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install system in America/New_York 2. reboot 3. change /etc/sysconfig/clock to Europe/Amsterdam 4. reboot 5. date Actual results: Wed May 12 10:40:04 EDT 2004 Expected results: Wed May 12 16:40:19 CEST 2004 Additional info:
ZONE is written by the config tools as a marker of their last state, actually.
Hmmh, I was more thinking of unattended installations. For example if I kickstart about 20-100 systems at one time and then need to change the system tz on each and everyone of them by copying to /etc/localtime by hand it gets a bit tedious. ;-) Would you consider including a simple patch to initscripts which checks if the string defined in ZONE is a valid file in the /usr/share/timezone/ directory and copies it to /etc/localtime? I guess there might be a chicken and a egg problem since the localtime is probably set before /usr is being mounted..?
Exactly; that's why it's a copy and not a symlink in the first place. :/
Created attachment 108393 [details] script to set system timezone based on ZONE variable in /etc/sysconfig/clock I noticed this same problem in Fedora Core 1. Some of the sysadmins at my company were updating the ZONE variable in the clock file, thinking this would set the system's timezone upon reboot, but it was not. A search throughout the init scripts confirmed this. To resolve it, I wrote a new script that can be called automatically at system startup or manually at anytime the superuser wishes. The script tries to make appropriate guesses as to what the system's correct timezone should be, based on either the ZONE variable in /etc/sysconfig/clock or the /etc/localtime file. If the ZONE variable is valid, it prefers that. If ZONE is invalid or not set, then the script uses /etc/localtime and updates the ZONE variable in the clock file. If localtime is a symlink to a valid zone file, then use that time zone. If locatime is not a symlink, then the script uses MD5 hash to find the matching zone file under /usr/share/zoneinfo. Finally, the script optionally emails errors, warnings, information, and debug messages to an email address specified. The approach I take in my script is to symlink /etc/localtime to the appropriate zone file under /usr/share/zoneinfo. That may or may not be desirable behavior, but it works for me. If not the desired behavior, then the line "ln -s $ZONEFILE $LOCALTIME" can be rewritten as "cp -f $ZONEFILE $LOCALTIME"
Moving to s-c-date; it's probably best for it to comment when it writes the file that that is not the authoritative setting.
Fixed in system-config-date-1.7.99.2.