On 3/28/07, Erik Anderson <erikerik at gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/28/07, Rob Terhaar <robbyt at robbyt.net> wrote: > > ok can someone explain why just doing > > ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime > > > > is bad? > > I've wondered the same thing in the past. The best explanation I > could come up with is that if you're symlinking your tz file and have > /usr on a separate partition and that partition fails to mount > someday, things could get messy. > > I'm a gentoo user, and when I started using the distro, they > recommended symlinking that file. Recently though, they've changed > their recommendation to actually copy the tz file. > This is across all distros. It's brought on by our wonderful legislatures changing when DST occurs. All that being said, there's more to making a system compliant for DST than just updating the tzdata package. You also need to update glibc packages, and if you're running java, that as well. On an RH/Fedora based system, there's a total of 4 packages if you don't count java: Glibc-common Glibc Glibc-utils Tzdata If you read into the FAQ by Red Hat, you would notice that if you updated all packages together, you do not need to change the /etc/localtime file by hand. It's done automatically. It would be a bad idea to delete the file, and recreate a symlink of /etc/localtime to your /usr/share/zoneinfo/TZFILE as the localtime file will be updated every time you update your system with the packages listed above and revert back to a copy of your tz file. The /etc/localtime file is a copy of your timezone as specified within the /etc/sysconfig/clock file on RH based systems. Or, equivalent file depending upon your distro. -- -Shawn -Nemo me impune lacessit. Ne Obliviscaris..