Sunday, March 11, 2007 marks the new change for clocks for Daylight Savings Time in the US.
A lot of computers, cell phones, etc. are not ready for this change.
I have a few Linux servers running older versions of Linux that are being used for development and other purposes. These servers have a high uptime, work great and don't really need to be upgraded to the latest and greatest Red Hat or CentOS release.
Until now.
Here's a workaround I used to get these systems ready for March 11th. Your mileage may vary.
You can verify your Timezone readiness with the following command run as root:
# zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007 /etc/localtime.orig Sun Apr 1 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600 /etc/localtime.orig Sun Apr 1 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000 /etc/localtime.orig Sun Oct 28 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000 /etc/localtime.orig Sun Oct 28 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
If you see Apr 1, then you're in trouble. If it says March 11, then you're all ready to go.
One requirement is that your glibc is at least version 2.3.2-64 (from 2003). This version split out the timezone data into its own directory structure.
On a few of my servers, I was able to get the new tzdata rpm that has the files with the updated timezone information. Since the RPM is labeled as noarch, these files should work across different architectures.
You can download the CentOS RPM here. if you don't have access to it.
Install the rpm, then run 'system-config-date' if it's on your system.
If 'system-config-date' is not available, then manually copy from /usr/share/zoneinfo/TIMEZONE where TIMEZONE is your timezone file (e.g. mine is CST6CDT) to /etc/localtime.
# cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.orig # cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT /etc/localtime
Then run zdump again to verify the changes were applied:
# zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000 /etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000 /etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
If you see March 11, then you're all ready for the time change.
Good Luck.
I'm officially an 'inventor' according to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for Patent 7,174,152. The patent that was filed while a was working at Sprint in 2003 was recently approved.
System for event correlation in cellular networks was a fun project to work on, but we'll have to wait and see if Sprint really uses it for anything.
The process to get a patent filed, documented, etc. was certainly interesting. There is a dialect specifically created by lawyers when writing patents, it's pretty amazing how complicated it gets to understand the actual description of a patent.