Kerry Miller wrote: > I've got several different flavors of Fedora Core running both at home and > work and have been researching how to make changes to when it switches > from standard time to daylight saving time. The only thing I found was > that it links to files under /usr/share/zoneinfo but those don't look like > text files. how do I edit those files and then compile them to make the > DST changes at the right time? > > Or, is there another fix for this? Is there a patch or updated RPM to > replace the files in /zoneinfo? The solution I have found works for all RedHat and Fedora Core implementations I have tried, specifically AS3, AS4, FC3, FC4, FC5, FC6. Here are the steps I take (via a couple of shell scripts.) All of these OSs use the same timezone data, so all that has to be done is to copy the entire contents of /usr/share/zoneinfo from an updated system to the same directory on the system to be updated. Then I run a script that checks the date and time, copies the appropriate file to /etc/localtime and has you visually verify the change. NOTE: Line numbers do not go into the script or command line! 1 echo Current date and time: `date` 2 echo Changing to March 12 2007 at 17:00 3 date 031217002007 > /dev/null 4 echo Verify time change: `date` 5 echo Configuring for new zone information 6 cp -f /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime 7 echo Time should now be 18:00: `date` 8 echo Stopping time update service 9 service ntpd stop > /dev/null 10 echo Changing to current date and time 11 ntpdate 1.fedora.pool.ntp.org > /dev/null 12 echo Starting time update service 13 service ntpd start > /dev/null 14 echo Verify date and time are current: `date` Let me explain this a bit. Line 1 displays the current time. Line 3 changes the date to March 12, 2007 at 5:00PM. On my pre-update system it shows as Mon Mar 12 17:00:00 CST 2007. Line 4 displays the new current time of March 12, 2007 at 5:00PM. Line 6 copies the central time zone data to /etc/localtime. Line 7 displays the current time. If the system needed the update, the time will display as Mon Mar 12 18:00:00 CDT 2007 (within a second or two). If not, it will remain at 17:00:00 CST. Line 9 stops the NTP daemon. Line 11 runs ntpdate so that the system time will be changed back to the real current tiem. Line 13 starts the NTP daemon again. Lastly, line 14 has you verify that the time is current. It looks a bit long and drawn out, but it has helped me verify that the system timezone data went in successfully. If there are any questions, let me know. -- Nathaniel Hall, GSEC GCFW GCIA GCIH GCFA Spider Security
