Bob's Notepad: Time Zone Updates

http://tf.nist.gov/general/dst.htm

Thanks to the all-knowing official-type people, they have made the world a better place by making us start DST three weeks early. Apparently none of these people realize that

1> This DOES NOT change the amount of daylight we have so their energy saving reason is mute

2> Computers have been programmed a certain way for years.... We should have anticipated the whole Y2K thing because its a numerical science... we COULDNT have anticipated whack-jobs changing the way our world runs.

At any rate, almost all of my servers and workstations updated flawlessly including Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux machines. A few, however, didnt -- mostly because they weren't running any type of automatic updates.

For my MythTV system (Debian based -- should work the same on other debian/ubuntu systems) I just downloaded a new tzdata deb file and installed it. Get the file from http://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/tzdata and then install it with "dpkg -i tzdata*"

I administer a RHEL4 machine (one of the last remaining -- someday it will become ubuntu, I swear) which did not do the update. Don't bother going to Red Hat's site... they step you through God knows what to accomplish something that really is not that hard.... oh, and God forbid their help page give you a link to the file -- you only get ease of use if you give them all your money. Anyway, get this file from rpmfind: ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/updates/6/i386/tzdata-2007c-1.fc6.noarch.rpm (yes, I am aware it's a fedora core rpm but it works quite well and you dont have to give Red Hat all your money). Once you have that file, run "rpm -i tzdata*" and once that completes, run "system-config-date" ... just reselect your timezone and exit and you're all set.

I don't see any reason why the above RHEL instructions won't work on other fedora, RHEL, or CentOS systems -- but I can't confirm.

Also, if you have a FreeBSD system, check this out: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/misc/zoneinfo/. I don't have any FreeBSD boxen but I found this link and figured I'd post it as well.

Mandrake/Mandriva users should be able to just do an update through urpmi ... but again, I don't have any of them boxens so I can't confirm :)

Windows: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com"

Mac OSX: