ok can someone explain why just doing
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

is bad?

here's what redhat recommends:

Update /etc/localtime by hand after installing the latest tzdata
package. This can be done with a simple copy command:

    * cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/$CURRENT_TIMEZONE /etc/localtime
    * where $CURRENT_TIMEZONE is your local timezone (e.g., America/NewYork).


why copy? why not symlink? (or even hardlink?)

On 3/28/07, Marc Skinner <marc at e-skinner.net> wrote:
> which distro are you using and version.  if its redhat there is a great
> DST FAQ on there site:
>
> https://www.redhat.com/support/resources/faqs/dst/
>
> don't forget to bounce crond - it needs to reread the timezone file upon
> service startup - unfortunately it only reads it during start up.
>
> Joey Rockhold wrote:
> > I see the word "reboot" was mentioned.  Make sure you down that drink,
> > Bob!
> >
> > - Joey
> >
> > On 3/28/07, *Justin Krejci* < jus at krytosvirus.com
> > <mailto:jus at krytosvirus.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     > On 3/27/07, Bob Hartmann < bob.hartmann at gmail.com
> >     <mailto:bob.hartmann at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >     >> Debian.
> >     >> I'm not getting email from the list, btw.  I can see my posts
> >     on the
> >     >> archive, tho, so I appreciate your help here.
> >     >
> >     > You're using gmail, which doesn't handle mailing list replies
> >     > particularly well.  Make sure to hit "reply-to-all" to make sure
> >     your
> >     > emails get sent out to the whole list, not just the person who
> >     replied
> >     > to your message.
> >     >
> >     > Anyway - I don't use debian, but I believe you can run:
> >     >
> >     > $ apt-get update
> >     > $ apt-get install tzdata
> >     >
> >     > That should do it...no reboot required :-)
> >     >
> >     > -erik
> >
> >     NTP does not affect timezone settings.
> >
> >     To determine if your timezone data is current (at least with
> >     regards to
> >     the US DST change) you can run
> >     zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
> >
> >     if you see Sun Apr 1 then you know you have old data
> >     if you see Sun Mar 11 then you are current
> >
> >     This is a little shell script I wrote to ease updating many
> >     servers of
> >     mixed distros. It worked on redhat 7.3, rhel3, suse 9.2, suse 9.3 and
> >     openbsd (except localtime is a symlink).
> >     It assumes you're running as root.
> >
> >     wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
> >     mkdir tzdata
> >     mv tzdata2007c.tar.gz tzdata
> >     cd tzdata
> >     mkdir zoneinfo.bak
> >     ls -ld /etc/localtime
> >     sleep 3s
> >     # look to make sure localtime is not a symlink
> >     ls -ld /etc/localtime > zoneinfo.bak/localtime.zdump.txt
> >     zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007 >>
> >     zoneinfo.bak/localtime.zdump.txt
> >     cp /etc/localtime /root/tzdata/zoneinfo.bak/
> >     cd /usr/share/
> >     tar czvf /root/tzdata/zoneinfo.bak/zoneinfo.tar.gz zoneinfo/
> >     cd /root/tzdata
> >     tar zxvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz
> >     zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
> >     cd zoneinfo/
> >     cp -rf * /usr/share/zoneinfo
> >     cp -f CST6CDT /etc/localtime
> >     zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
> >
> >
> >
> >     Most server processes that care about time will check the
> >     localtime when
> >     they start and never check again during their life. You can just
> >     restart
> >     services but I prefer to reboot after you get patched to make sure all
> >     running processes notice the change.
> >
> >     Java and things that depend on Java (eg recent versions of Cold
> >     Fusion)
> >     maintain their own timezone settings so they have OS independence.
> >     Sun has
> >     a great and simple tzupdate.jar file for patching all java
> >     executables. It
> >     worked great for me as well.
> >
> >
> >     _______________________________________________
> >     TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> >     tclug-list at mn-linux.org <mailto:tclug-list at mn-linux.org>
> >     http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> >     <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list>
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> > tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> >
>
>
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