heya, On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 12:51 +1000, Andrew Cowie wrote: > On Tue, 2005-09-08 at 11:58 -0500, Robert Larson wrote: > > I just recently switched a few of my servers to UTC from localtime > > My sense is that the responses you received in this thread, while > helpful, sorta missed the point.
Agreed! You beat me to the post :) > There's no reason for a server to have any system-wide timezone other > than UTC, so yes, > > > /etc/conf.d/clock: CLOCK="UTC" > > /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC > > is correct. In fact, setting the hardware clock to UTC is most correct > for any Linux system - the only tie to mess with it is if the Linux > installation on a machine co-exists with a broken OS, say, Windows > perhaps. > > But here's the real trick: *any* individual application can localize the > timezone information it gets by [re]setting the TZ environment variable. > And that should be all you have to worry about. Precisely the point. It is worth noting though that the root user should never set anything in .bash_profile (or equivalent) to change the TZ var, that should only be done as a user requiring the different time view. On a different note, while someone mentioned the users of ntp-client and ntpd, it is worth mentioning that openntp doesn't require the same setup as it IS capable of making large adjustments by itself (ie no annoying ntpdate -b before starting) and so you can just add the one init script as supplied. In fact as general I like openntp as a replacement to ntp BUT AFAIK it doesn't have a ntpq equivalent so its hard to know if its actually working and how the different peers are functioning. > [P.S. You may have to recorrect the hardware clock *once*, see `hwclock > --help`. Also, be aware that NTP will only act if the skew is within > certain limits, so if you're way out, it won't do anything] Also worth noting the option: CLOCK_SYSTOHC="yes" in /etc/conf.d/clock. This will sync your system time to HW clock on shutdown and is not a bad idea if you are using a NTPd system. -- [email protected] mailing list
