Anne Wilson wrote:
On Tuesday 03 June 2008 14:57:29 Karanbir Singh wrote:
Guy Boisvert wrote:
Hi!
It appears that there have been some changes to tzdata recently. We
run an application that needs the server to stay at GMT. Previously, we
used the Casablanca timezone but now there seems to be a 1 hour
difference to GMT. I checked the London zone and they seem to change
time too.
Looks like you were never on GMT / UTC - but on British Time, Which in
the summer is one hour off GMT
Where/how is the system clock set? My server appears to have the system clock
on GMT/UTC and KDE on British Time.
Anne
Hi!
Thanks for all the fast responses! I didn't know about the internals
of the tzdata, the symlinks and the potential problems that Rick
reported. So finally, before the 1st response arrived from the list, i
decided to do a "brute force" downgrade.
I downloaded the previous CentOS tzdata file from:
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/3/srodzaj/1/search/tzdata
and did an rpm -ivh --force tzdata-2007k-2.el4.noarch.rpm
I rebooted the server and everything went ok! I didn't have the time
to explain my case but for the sake of completeness, here it is:
1) Our application is for TV broadcasting. We have a complete in-house
developped automatic broadcasting system.
2) We have two players (1 active, 1 standby) that run on Windows 2000
Server platform. There are 3 deamons: Copy service (from the big
multi-terabyte library to local "cache" of 200 gigs), Broadcaster
(playlist maker) and Player. The former 2 services read data from
PostgreSQL database on CentOS x64 4.6. As is said, the Broadcaster
service read from the database and make the playlist then send it to the
player. Copier make check what it needs locally and act accrodingly.
It managed a kind of big local cache.
3) The broadcast schedule is entered with a JAVA application that writes
the time and date in GMT/UTC time in the database. The JAVA application
knows the local time and the offset and write accordingly, adding the
amount of time required (we are in Montreal so it's GMT-4 or GMT-5) to
"reach" GMT+0.
4) The database servers have always been in Casablanca zone and until
today, it seems that it was never changing time. 1st of june, tzdata
was updated by a yum update and since then, it was only a question of
time before we'de be offset. Playlists are looked up and made for 36
hours so today was panic day!
5) Stumbling across the problem, i read many strange things while
Googling, related to what Rick said in his post to the list: localtime
file, symlinks, etc. I was kinda lost!
Practically, as i said, i tried to find the GMT zone doing a
system-config-date to no avail... I was shocked! We shouldn't be the
only one to have this need!
So, as i decode from what i received in response to my initial post, and
correct me if i'm wrong, all that does system-config-date is to copy a
file from /usr/share/zoneinfo/... into /etc/localtime ? (and maybe set a
couple of symlinks?).
And if i do what Marcelo said:
cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/right/Etc/GMT-0 /etc/localtime
am i cleared from future updates / changes in timezones? I simply want
the server to stay at GMT+0 and never change timezone.
I'm waiting for advice from experts!
And would it be possible to include "GMT+0" in system-update-date ?
What is strange on top of all that is that the time of the schedule
seems to be stored on the database relative to the local time of the
server... I'll have that checked by the programmers!
Many thanks to Marcelo, Rick, Karambir & Anne!
Guy Boisvert, ing.
IngTegration inc.
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