daylight savings time tags:  help desk

when i installed fedora core 4 on hecubus, i had chosen the time zone as america/chicago, as that's a city in the timezone i wanted . . . or so i thought.

so this past sunday at 2 am it became 3 am, but my server stayed at 2 am, which i didn't notice until about an hour ago.  after some searching that was mostly non-helpful (the most common thing i found was about how it is best for linux if you set the hardware clock to utc, which is what i had done), i eventually found something indicating it might work right if i changed the time zone to us/central.  i'm not sure why this is different from america/chicago, but after the following steps, it's now showing cdt instead of cst.  guess i'll find out in fall if i've really fixed this problem!

here's what i did:
1. delete /etc/localtime, then create a symbolic link by that name to /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central.
2. edit /etc/sysconfig/clock and change ZONE from America/Chicago to US/Central

please note that the above post is likely made up in its entirety.

pm www

quote

in addition, it's generally a bad idea to schedule any daily cron jobs to run at any time between 1 am and 3 am, since daylight savings time means that the job will either run twice or not at all when the clocks change...

i've got one job for this site scheduled for 2:30 am, and since there was no 2:30 am for daylight savings time, it didn't run that day.  eventually i may remember to schedule it for 3:30 instead . . .

please note that the above post is likely made up in its entirety.

pm www

quote

i had a script that was running every 15 minutes, grabbing xml from wunderground.com, and doing a regular expression match to get the current weather conditions.  i had the time zone abbreviation “cdt” in there explicitly (since the weather is for a specific location, the time zone won’t change, right?) and of course daylight saving time ends and now it’s coming through as “cst” and my script can’t find its match.  easily fixable by changing “cdt” to “c[ds]t” but i sure felt stupid about it.

please note that the above post is likely made up in its entirety.

pm www

quote