Timezones.

Paul Civati paul at xciv.org
Mon May 7 11:42:24 BST 2001


"Simon Griffiths" <simon.g at claycrossbs.co.uk> wrote:

> Heres some background.  We use postfix here locally and last week I decided
> it was time to re-install freebsd and create a nice new mail server that was
> ready to be brought into production, previously it was a makeshift test/toy
> server.  I had set the timezone at install to United Kingdom (BST) and said
> that the cmos was not set to UTC.  Not really thinking about this mail then
> arrived with a timestamp an hour later than the system clock, thinking a

Normally for the free UNIX systems you would want the system clock
to run on UTC and let the o/s handle the timezone setting offset from
that.  The only time this causes problems (I think) is if you run a
dual boot machine as ISTR Windows will adjust the system clock
forwards and backwards (lame!) to handle the daylight time saving.

> May  4 09:40:00 mail CRON[13426]: (root) CMD (/usr/libexec/atrun)
> May  4 10:40:27 mail cucipop[13428]: bill 192.3.6.100 0, 0 (0), 0 (0)
> 
> As you can see some things going through syslog have the correct time and
> some show the reset utc time from the cmos.  Anyone get any thoughts on
> this?

That's bizarre, that logging will be going through syslog so syslog
should be logging a uniform time.  Do you perhaps have the ntpdate
running out of syslog, and it's updating the time?

Normally all you need do to set the timezone is link /etc/localtime
to the correct zone file for your region, eg:

  /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London

-Paul-




More information about the Ukfreebsd mailing list