Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77818
time error if /etc/localtime is a symlink
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:32:11 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; T312461) Description of problem: If /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver then when the system comes up it seems to take the time as UTC instead of PST (and so drops 8 hours). If it is a copy of the file then all is well. This has only recently started happening after months of correct operation (at least it seemed to be working correctly). More specifically (and confusingly). At the point in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit where hwclock and date are run I have confirmed that the flags passed to hwclock are "--hctosys --localtime" but the result of the "date" command displays the correct date and time, except it states that the time is UTC instead of PST. By the time that the initialisation is complete and I get the chance to log in "date" returns a time 8 hours earlier but now states that the time is PST rather than UTC. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver /etc/localtime 2.shutdown -r now 3. Actual Results: As it goes through the initialisation I see Setting clock (localtime) : <whatever> UTC Expected Results: As it goes through the initialisation I expect to see Setting clock (localtime) : <whatever> PST Additional info: The issue for me is that the solutions on the newsgroups generally involve using a symlink rather than copying the file.
If it's a symlink to /usr, and /usr isn't mounted that early when hwclock sets the time.... That's why we keep it a file. :)