On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 10:10:55AM +1100, Lucas King wrote:
: is it possible to have the network delivered time adjusted depending on 
: whether it is EST or DST?

NTP is always UTC.

: the clients run a variety of operating systems.  these include Linux, 
: OS/2, Windows, VMS and DOS.  writing a script, to determine whether it 
: is EST or DST, for each operating system is not really an option.

Depends on the varying brokenness of each OS.

For free OSs using Olson's time stuff, you want to set /etc/localtime
to be a symlink to, or to have the same content as, an appropriate
file somewhere in /usr/share.

An alternative is to set the TZ environment variable to
Australia/Sydney, which should do the same thing.

There's another time protocol (TSP?) used by the timed program on free
OSs.  You may find some of your clients want this instead of ntp.
With judicious twiddling (depending on how your OS vendor broke
things) you can probably get ntp and timed to run on the same machine.
(I've done it in the past, but haven't bothered with timed for over a
decade now.)

NTP gives you absolute time, with respect to external sources that
know better than you do.

TSP(?) gives you relative time, such that the cooperating machines
converge, but not necessarily to the truth.  Sort of like public
opinion in the presence of the media...  :-)

-- 
Christopher Vance
-- 
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug

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