Re: [PLUG] System Clock

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 07:13:47AM -0500, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 06:55, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 06:44:54AM -0500, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> > > Any ideas?
> > ls -l /etc/localtime
> lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           36 Mar  1 04:20 /etc/localtime
> -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York

Then either your system clock's set to UTC and your OS thinks it's
not or vice versa.

Under Red Hat, check /etc/sysconfig/clock and alter the setting of
UTC.

Note that ntpd is incapable of making a change of more than a couple
of seconds. It's impossible for it to be the cause of a 12 hour
clock skew. (If [x]ntpd(8) sees dates that far out from its time
servers, it dies and logs a loud, angry message about it.)

Also note that using rdate(8) is a bit of a blunt way to do things.
Using ntpdate(8) is the preferred method, and under Red Hat populating
/etc/ntp/step-tickers with ntp server IP addresses, one per line,
will cause the xntpd init script to synchronize the time with
ntpdate(8) (which permits massive skew) and then immediately start
ntpd(8) to keep things in sync.

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 08:24:45AM -0500, Paul wrote:
> The symlink makes sense, my file is binary.  I wonder why...

Strictly, the file's binary because there's no reason for it to be
human readable.

Some OSes and distributions will copy the zone file to /etc/localtime
rather than making a sym link. Some may do one or the other based
on whether /usr's a separate partition or not (which makes sense,
especially if /usr won't be mounted yet when ntpd is to be started,
which should be early in the boot process so that the times in your
syslog version of the dmesg(8) output make sense). Some may even
make a hard link if it's on the same partition and a sym link if
it's not.

ls(1)'s long output lists the number of links to an inode (the
second field) and using the -i switch will tell you what inode
number that is. If the link count is 2 or above, compare the inode
number with the inode numbers of files in /usr/share/zoneinfo (or
wherever your OS keeps zone files) to find out what time zone you're
set to.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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