DST changes

[Jeff Garland]

David wrote:
> The latest panic at work is, of course, the DST changes coming up in 

Seems to be a common thing lately...

> march.  I like to think that I have my systems set to UTC with the correct 
> zone specified, however, I'm not sure.  I've just been checking all  my 
> rhel servers and lo and behold, /etc/zoneinfo is not a symlink.  My dark 
> side says that I'm not utc, but...how can I tell for sure?

I think if you just run 'date' (assuming no TZ variable is set in the env) it 
should tell you.  If you are set to UTC it should say something like:

Fri Feb 16 18:40:18 UTC 2007

Should be 7 hours ahead of the current Az time.

> I realize that AZ isn't affected by the change, but we have customers in 
> other states that are affected.
> 
> One other question.  using zic to create a new TZ file, does it default to 
> overwriting the current /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST file? I can't find in the 
> man page how to write it to, say, /tmp/EST so I can verify it. 
> Redirecting didn't work.

On my ubuntu system it looks like there's a -d flag:

        -d directory
               Create time conversion information files in the named directory 
rather than in the standard directory named below

In any case, the usr/share stuff is likely read-only to non-root users so if 
you do try as a user other than root you should probably be safe -- please 
check, of course.

HTH,

Jeff