by All right, maybe this has been addressed. In fact, I can't see how it
hasn't been addressed, but I've been looking for days and can't find a fix.
It seems that FAT (MSDOS, FAT & VFAT) screws up when converting times to
UNIX time (aka UTC) and then back to local time. It doesn't take into
account Daylight Savings Time. Actually, it does, but not correctly.
Here's the issue as I see it. The FAT file system on Windows stores all
dates and times as local time. Whatever time the system clock has
(whether it is EST or EDT or MST or whatever) that gets written to the
drive.
When mounting a FAT partition under Linux, it converts all of these
times to UTC using the value of sys_tz.tz_minuteswest. But, here's the
issue. There is another value in the kernel called
sys_tz.tz_daylightsavings, but this doesn't seem to be used anymore.
What happens is, tz_daylightsavings gets changed according to the
"effective time zone" taking into account daylight savings time.
For example, EST is -5 hours from UTC, but EDT is -4 hours from UTC.
So, during daylight savings time, tz_minuteswest is 4*60 and during
standard time it is 5*60.
This is applied to the FAT dates to bring them to UTC, but if
tz_minuteswest is set to 4*60 during daylight savings time, then only
files written during daylight savings time are correctly being moved to
UTC. Files written during standard time are 1 hour less than they
should be. The reverse is true when the Linux box is set to standard
time. There, files written during daylight savings time are one hour
more than they should be.
Now the Linux box "thinks" that all times on the FAT file system are
correctly moved to UTC even though they are not. So when it displays
them, it coverts back to local time. However, it takes into account the
date of the file, and brings them to local time using the correct offset
according to the file date. If the file date is during standard time
(in the East), it subtracts 5 hours, if the date is during daylight
savings time, it subtracts 4 hours. But, half of the files have not
been correctly brought to UTC, so half of the files are 1 hour off. If
the Linux box is correctly in daylight savings time, all files on the
FAT file system written during DST are correct and all standard time
files are wrong. Vice versa if the Linux box is in standard time.
Is there a patch out there? I find it hard to believe that this has
never been addressed, but in searching the news groups it looks like it
has come up, but has never been fixed.
Any ideas?
Thanks...