Solaris

I am new to this so i figure this is an easy one.. How do i change the time zone from Central to Eastern time in SunOS 5.8 ? I thought I needed to edit the /etc/TIMEZONE and them issue TZ=US/Eastern but I want to check. Is a reboot required afterwards?

If I want to change the system time should i just issue the date -a - sss.fff to slow it up??

Thank you

The internal time of the OS should be exactly on UTC - do you not have ntpd or xntpd running?
If the system clock is off by a few seconds then

Code:

# slow down
date -a -sss.fff
#speed up
date -a sss.fff
# correct TZ value for Eastern Timezone in /etc/TIMEZONE
TZ=US/Eastern

You may find that the EDT <-> EST change occurs on the wrong day of the year - it just changed for the US.

For POSIX systems, changing TZ does change how the time is reported in any POSIX compliant command that looks at time values, like date or ls, for example.

As SU I changed the time zone to EDT but it only held for a short while then went back to CDT. I did VI the /etc/TIMEZONE. What else did I miss??

You missed to understand the previous reply.

You never change the system clock timezone on Unix. It is always UTC (a.k.a. GMT).

The way the clock is *displayed* depends on the environment variable TZ and so can vary on a per process basis. To view the correct timezone in your shell, just run:

Code:

TZ=US/Eastern
export TZ
date

If you want the default timezone to be set, you'll need to reboot.