On June 25, 2003 Tom Diehl <tdiehl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 25 Jun 2003, Jeremy Portzer wrote: >> On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 10:59, dsavage@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: >> > When I went to the updates.redhat.com site to download the latest >> errata updates this morning, I found that the timestamp for the >> ypserv-2.8-0.9E files were at least three hours into the future. At >> about 08:30 CDT, the timestamps on those files were showing June 25 >> 11:17 with both gftp and an ftp client in Xterm. (Time and zone >> settings at this end are correct.) >> > >> >> I would guess that updates.redhat.com would be set to the GMT time >> zone. I don't know whether FTP is smart enough to determine that and >> convert to local time zone or not. Hmm. > > They are GMT. > > I hav never seen an ftp client that displayed anything other than what > is on the server. > > One other thing if you are worried about the files just check the gpg > sig on them. Tom, Yeah, I could. I could also use md5sum if I had two local copies. But that wasn't why I asked the question. One reason for using an ftp client like gftp that sets the date/time to match the source is that I know at a glance if the distant end has changed. Trouble was, when I looked at the two files I downloaded, bash listed them as "June 25 2003" rather than "June 25 11:17". In all the years I've been using ftp to download files (and touch to sync their date/timestamps) I can't recall ever running into this before. Have I just been "lucky" and never downloaded something sooner than the GMT offset since its creation, or is what I encountered this morning really wrong? I may be asking this question poorly, and without complete knowledge of how file dates/times are actually stored and displayed. But it seems to me that when I log onto a remote web site with ftp and see a file's date/time, there should be no ambiguity as to whether it's in local or universal time. As another responder has noted, e-mail clients (for example) are able to handle time zone information correctly. --Doc Savage Fairview Heights, IL
