Note that the timezone fixes are no longer needed, as we are back into normal timing.
The Australian timezone change is a couple of days away. If you are running servers depending on accurate time, you will need to check and possibly update them. Note that this process is generic enough that you can use it with any timezone, not just for Australia, and should work fine with almost all Linux distrubutions that use glibc (99% of them - if you don't know, you are probably using glibc).
These notes have been adapted from an email from Anibal Monsalve Salazar on the debian-au mailing list. Many thanks to Anibal.
If you are running Dapper, you can update your Australian timezones by just running 'apt-get update; apt-get install libc6'. The update may have been automatically installed by update-manager already.
For Warty, Hoary and Breezy you will have to update your system manually. There are binary packages available at http://people.ubuntu.com/~jbailey/glibc-tzupdate/ but they do not cover all architectures. If your architechture isn't covered, or you want to do it manually, read on. Please remember that if libc6 gets updated during this time (security update), you will have to do this all over again.
To check/change your timezone, use tzconfig. In my case, tzconfig tells me that my timezone is Australia/Melbourne.
To check if your timezone change will happen on either "Sun Mar 26" or "Sun Apr 2", run:
zdump -v Australia/Melbourne | grep 2006
Replace Australia/Melbourne with your own timezone.
If your timezone change will happen on "Sun Apr 2", you're safe.
If your timezone change will happen on "Sun Mar 26", you may want to update the Australian timezones.
If you cannot update libc6, you can update the Australian timezones manually, as described in the following lines.
1. Download the timezone (australasia) file. Run:
wget -nH -N http://people.debian.org/~anibal/timezone/australasia
- It includes the Australian, Indian and Pacific timezone information.
If you don't want to use Anibals copy of the australasia file, download http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/glibc/glibc-2.4.tar.bz2 (size is 15,202,445) and extract glibc-2.4/timezone/australasia. Together with Anibals copy of the australasia file, there are files with the md5 checksum and his gpg signature of the australasia file.
2. Backup your zoneinfo directory. Run:
tar cf - /usr/share/zoneinfo | bzip2 -9 - > zoneinfo.tar.bz2
3. Update the zone info for australasia. Run:
sudo zic australasia
4. Check your timezone change.
zdump -v Australia/Melbourne | grep 2006
- It should show "Sun Apr 2".