TimezoneFix

Revision 1 as of 2006-03-24 03:49:20

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The Australian timezone change is a couple of days away. If you are running servers depending on acurrate time, you will need to check or update them. Note that this process is generic enough that you can use it with any appropriate timezone, not just for Australia.

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, to update your Australian timezone, just run 'apt-get update; apt-get install libc6'.

For Woody, Hoary of Breezy you may 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 architechures. If your architechure isn't covered, or you want to do it manually, read on.

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 timezone.

If you cannot update libc6, you could update the Australian timezone manually, as described in the following lines.

1. Download the timezone (australasia) file. It includes the Australia, Indian and Pacific timezone information.

2. Backup you zoneinfo directory.

  • tar cf - /usr/share/zoneinfo | bzip2 -9 - > zoneinfo.tar.bz2

3. As root, run:

  • zic australasia

4. Check your timezone change.

  • zdump -v Australia/Melbourne | grep 2006 It should show "Sun Apr 2".