Well, see summary. I don't know why. Since the GeoIP stuff got into anaconda, all my VMs come up with 'America/St_Johns timezone' in the Date & Time spoke. anaconda.log shows: 21:41:41,863 INFO anaconda: Running Thread: AnaGeolocationRefreshThread (140272114689792) 21:41:41,863 INFO anaconda: Starting geolocation lookup 21:41:41,863 INFO anaconda: Geolocation provider: Fedora MirrorManager 21:41:42,683 INFO anaconda: Geolocation lookup finished in 0.8 seconds 21:41:42,684 INFO anaconda: territory: CA 21:41:42,684 INFO anaconda: Thread Done: AnaGeolocationRefreshThread (140272114689792) 21:41:43,485 INFO anaconda: Thread Done: AnaStorageThread (140272123082496) 21:41:44,049 INFO anaconda: Didn't get a single locale from Geolocation, falling back to default locale. but isn't the 'default locale' usually New York? I've never seen St. Johns before. Haven't had time yet to see what happens on bare metal.
Oh, should have mentioned - this is using the Fedora virt stack, virt-manager / KVM / qemu, the host is an F19 system also.
GeoIP is currently used for two things: * setting language & locale * setting the timezone These two are handled separately, which means that even if you are in a territory with multiple locales (such as CA or Switzerland), where Anaconda defaults back to English, the territory code will still be used to set the timezone. But of course it is just a preset, that would hopefully be right most of the time and thus save users a few clicks. As Anaconda only has the territory code to work with (in this case CA), it seems that the America/St_Johns is the default timezone for Canada. If you are not in Canada or anywhere nearby, the public IP of your corporate network gateway might be, fooling the GeoIP service. Also, Anaconda is currently using the MirrorManager mirror API for getting the territory code. This API is primarily meant for finding the fastest Fedora mirror, which might again make the GeoIP results less accurate (say, if the fastest mirror for your current location is in Canada). But we are already talking with the Fedora infrastructure guys about setting up a dedicated GeoIP API, which should not have these issues. So, basically, it works as intended.
Fair enough. I don't know who controls the 'default' timezones, but St. John's is not a very sensible default for Canada; it's in the NST/NDT - Newfoundland Standard / Daylight Time - zone, which is tiny and sparsely inhabited. A sensible choice for a default for Canada would be Toronto, the biggest city in the country and part of the most populous province.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 963531 ***