Keeping /etc/localtime up-to-date

[Brian Reichert]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:10:42AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 10:57 AM,  <dieterbsd at engineer.com> wrote:
> > I have been running FreeBSD and NetBSD with /etc/localtime being
> > a symlink for years and have not seen any problems as a result.
> 
> +1. Many Linux distros do the same thing as well (Gentoo is just one example).

RedHat is a counter-example.

Parts of the kernel are not timezone aware, and seem to be hard-coded
to use whatever TZ the hardware clock is in.  The symptom I was
running into was that the kernel's timestamps were waffling
back-and-forth during the boot process.

I was making use of a symlink, but the timezone data was on a
different partition from the root parition.  RedHat's support
officially said "don't use a symlink", as any process started before
the 'real' TZ files were available would reckon time differently
when printing timestamps.

Lots of people got bit by this:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=91228

YMMV.

> Thanks,
> -Garrett
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-- 
Brian Reichert				<reichert at numachi.com>
BSD admin/developer at large