Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello ,

We are investigating an issue from a customer from Western Australia related to DST change on 25 th March. The customer in Australia has the below settings for Time Zone. The System is Solaris 9.

TZ=Australia/NSW
CMASK=022


We are trying to reproduce the problem in our local enviorenment. We did the following steps

1. Changed the TZ parametre in /etc/TIMEZONE to Western Australia.
2. Rebooted the machine.
3. Manually set the time at 25 March 2007 2:58 AM

But the date didnt go 1 Hr back after 3:00.

We also manually changed the date to 1:58 but the clock didnt go 1 hr back after 2.

Any help on how to reproduce the DST on local env is appreciated .

Thanks
Mohammed

/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Australia/<timezone name>

Can you find a NSW file in the zoneinfo directory? It sounds like it is not there. Or maybe it has some issues, possibly protection.

Plus, DO NOT set time back and forth like that, you can cause cron jobs to do unexpected things. And mess up nightly processing.

UNIX time is kept in seconds since Jan 1 1970. Daylight time changes do not change that count. Changing the date does. The system uses files in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Australia/.... to display the time based on UTC calculated from the number of seconds.

You should set the date (in seconds) to match UTC, whatever that may be.
However use date -a to do that, it is less likely to screw up batch jobs.

You can manually set the timezone using the results of tzselect. It asks questions. tzdump should let you see what /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Australia/NSW thinks about DST, if the file is okay.