Very Computer

Folks,

We just flipped daylight savings time two months early in preparation
for the Olympics.

Sun's zonefino patches seem to have generally worked, but we're seeing
problems. Some apps seem to have cached time info and not changed
(Sybase, Control-M), whilst inetd on all Solari pre 8 are reporting the
wrong time if one queries the 'daytime' service. I've seen cron have
similar problems in SunOS4 days, but this kinda surprises me. Anyone
else in Oz having problems?

Rgds,
W.

PS. Also, the patches from Sun seem to have only changed the binary, zic
compiled files. The 'australasia' source file still has problems -- it
wants to call the New South Wales timezone 'Australia/Sydney' when it
should be 'Australia/NSW'...

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William Charles _______________________________________________________
Manager, Unix Systems Administration, Deutsche Bank AG, +61 2 9258 1916

William,

Yes, same symptoms on all Solaris 2.6 boxes I've checked, though I have
had others say it worked OK (though I suspect they're talking about
workstations, which _probably_ have been rebooted).

We're only affected by cron, as our apps either don't care about the
local time or are easily restarted. I have only seen a problem with
processes that have not been restarted (eg. cron).

Apparently the SUN patch advised to reboot, but the comment from the
sys admins I discussed it with was "yeah, but they always say that" :-)

m.

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That's the new standard name for the time zone in Sydney.  Not all
places in New South Wales have the same time zone, so the old name was
inaccurate.  If you want the old name, compile the 'backward' source
file too.  The names changed in 1993, but Solaris 8 continues to use
the old names by default.  Maybe Sun will upgrade some day.

If you want the latest source files, then bypass Sun and get them
directly from <ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/>.  More details can be
found in <http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm>.

Even if you're running Solaris 8 with all the patches, you'll need to
go to elsie to get the correct "date" output for this year's time
stamps if you live in any of the following places:

  Brazil (many locations), Bulgaria, Cuba, East Timor, Egypt, Estonia,
  Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova,
  Mongolia, Nunavut, Paraguay, Poland, Romania, far east Siberia, and Sudan.

I guess none of these places have customers who've raised enough stink
with Sun yet.  (Wait until October.  :-)

Quote:>Sun's zonefino patches seem to have generally worked, but we're seeing
>problems. Some apps seem to have cached time info and not changed
>(Sybase, Control-M)

Yes.  By far the easiest fix is to reboot.
If you can't reboot, you are in for some work.

Timezone names seem to be a big problem.

If I call date on a S 8 machine, I get:

Mittwoch, 30. August 2000, 14:12:30 Uhr MEST

Wich is wrong. It should be:

Mittwoch, 30. August 2000, 14:12:30 Uhr MESZ

MEZ ans MESZ are the official (by german time law) names for the timezone.

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URL:  http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling    ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix