Timezone info

[Nigel Wade]

Lunt, Nick wrote:
> Thanks for your help, but how do I see what time change rules are in the zone
> file ?
> 
> My /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London.
> 
> $ strings /etc/localtime TZif BDST $
> 
>> From that output I cannot tell that the time will change at 2am.
> 
> man tzfile and man tzset do not seem to show me how to change the time at
> which I would like the machine to start interpreting daylight savings time.
> 
> 
>>> If zoneinfo file contains correct rules it will be the same moment as set
>>> by the government. Therefore, you will not have any problems with the
>>> time change.
> 
> 
> 
> This is important because we have Oracle running on these machines, and
> Oracle does not react well to time changes.
> 
> On our HPUX boxes we have a /usr/lib/tztab file in which we can specify at
> what time to move over to daylight saving, and we schedule Oracle to be down
> at this time. Am I correct in thinking that we do not have this functionality
> on RH ?
> 
> Thanks, Nick .
> 

Sorry you won't get this answer in time...

You can get the full gory details from zdump.

# zdump -v Europe/London
...
Europe/London  Sun Oct 30 00:59:59 2005 UTC = Sun Oct 30 01:59:59 2005 BST 
isdst=1 gmtoff=3600
Europe/London  Sun Oct 30 01:00:00 2005 UTC = Sun Oct 30 01:00:00 2005 GMT 
isdst=0 gmtoff=0
...

So the timezone info says the clocks go back at 2am.

You can create new timezone files with zic. Or specify custom timezone 
information in the TZ environment variable. Changing the timezone does require a 
reboot for all the system processes and daemons to pick up the change.

-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555