On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Mason Schmitt wrote:

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> Brent L. Bates wrote:
> >      I THOUGHT I had taken care of this, now I'm not so sure.  I downloaded
> > and installed the lastest tzdata RPM.  `zdump -v' on the appropriate
> > /usr/share/zoneinfo file showed the correct information.  I copied the
> > zoneinfo file (/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York) to /etc/localtime and
> > thought that should fix everything.
> 
> This issue seems to be generating a lot of confusion for everyone in IT.
>  It was actually a story on the news this morning.  We have done our
> update, so I thought I would put together a small how-to.
> 
> Here are a few steps that you can follow on all your linux hosts,
> whether they are SL or not (in our case, redhat, mandrake and SL).
> These were the steps that I did on our small network.  On a larger
> network, presumably you have other means of running commands across a
> large number of hosts.
> 
> 
> Note: 'hostlist' contains a list of all linux hosts on the network.  As
> well, I use ssh keys to log into servers so that I'm not prompted for
> passwords in these little scripts.
> 
> 
> 1 - Discover which timezone your servers are currently set to
> - -------------------------------------------------------------
> for host in `cat ~/hostlist`; do
>   echo $host;
>   ssh $host cat /etc/sysconfig/clock;
> done
> 
> Your output should look like something like this.  As you can see the
> timezone for this computer is "Canada/Pacific"
> <host>
> UTC=true
> ARC=false
> ZONE=Canada/Pacific
> 
> 
> 2 - Update timezone data on all hosts
> - -----------------------------------
> Each server can be updated by simply copying over know good timezone
> files, symlinking /etc/localtime to the appropriate timezone file and
> rebooting the machine.  In our case, I grabbed updated timezone files
> from an SL4.4 box and copied them to all hosts.  The files I copied were:
> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Pacific
> and
> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver.
> 
> If you have servers in several different timezones, you may want to
> create a tarball with new zone info for all timezones listed in
> /usr/share/zoneinfo/, copy that tarball to all hosts and overwrite the
> old timezone data.  Then, based on the output from the script in section
> one, you could automate the creation of a symlink from the appropriate
> file in /usr/share/zoneinfo/ to /etc/localtime.
> 
> 
> 3 - Apply the changes
> - ------------------------
> The easiest way to ensure the changes are applied to all processes that
> use the locale settings, is a reboot.  However, if you really want to be
> sure everything is correct before rebooting, you can confirm the changes
> by running a short little script something like this.
> 
> for host in `cat ~/hostlist`; do
>   echo -n "$host  "
>   ssh $host "date -d 'March 11 2007 02:30' | awk '{print \$5}'"
> done
> 
> Note: I used the date command as it actually uses /etc/localtime and I
> can be much more specific about which time I want to see, than if I were
> to use zdump.
> 
> This script will spit out the timezone for each server.  All our servers
> are in the Pacific timezone so I should expect to see PDT if all is
> well.  If a change did not apply correctly then I would see PST.
> 
> Even if you have servers in multiple timezones, they should all indicate
> they are in a daylight savings time timezone rather than a standard time
> zone, so greping for 'D' may be sufficient to know whether the change is
> correct or not.
> 

The "official" way of updating /etc/localtime from the 
/usr/share/zoneinfo/  data is to install the latest glibc.  The Uptream 
Vendor has added a "trigger" on tzdata which will copy over the proper 
zoneinfo.

-Connie Sieh

 > > 
> Hopefully this is of use to someone and that no one has any issues as a
> result of the changeover this Sunday.
> 
> - --
> Mason Schmitt
> Systems Administrator
> Sunwave Cable Internet / Shuswap Internet Junction
> ph: (250) 832-9711
> www.sunwave.net
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