Timezone change 9 dec Venezuela

[Randy Grode]

Hello,

President Chavez decided yesterday that Venezuela will change timezone to 4,5 hours behind GMT on 9 december.
Question I have is Any patches available for this. As I cannot find any on this website.

Thanks in Advance.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Randy:

I can virtually guarantee that if the decision was made yesterday, there won't be any official patches today. However, that is not a problem.

You can modify your '/usr/lib/tztab' according to the rules defined in the 'tztab(4)' manpages. When done, plan to at least stop and restart the 'cron' daemon and any long-running processes like databases that have already read and cached the "old" daylight saving rules. A reboot is a simple way to insure that every process reads the new rules.

When an official patch appears, apply that in lieu of your custom one. In that way, your IPD (Installed Product Database) will reflect the correct checksums, etc. for the 'tztab' that you modified.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

No patch yet. Since HP does not supply a named timezone for Venezuela, you can create a timezone for VET4:30 which corresponds to the new offset. The file that controls the name and offset for the current timezone is /etc/TIMEZONE and the new entry would be:

TZ=VET4:30
export TZ

Once this file is changed, every new login will see the new time. However, for time-scheduled jobs such as cron and daemons that run all the time, you'll need to reboot so they pickup the new information.

It is important to know that HP-UX only keeps time as GMT (aka, UTC or Zulu time) and never changes system time for daylight saving. The TZ variable essentially translates the system time into an appropriate local time. You can see what the time will look like with a temporary change to the TZ value:

date
TZ=VET4:30 date

Compare the two and you'll see how the time is adjusted. This works for any offset, down to the minute and second. Since Venezuela currently has no daylight saving adjust, this is all you need -- no patch or change to tztab.

[Dennis Handly]

Something strange here. I was told the change was going to be back on Sept 24.

>I have is any patches available for this?

An official patch request for DST related issues must have a pointer to an official government organization document and sent to the local HP office.

>Bill: Since Venezuela currently has no daylight saving adjust, this is all you need -- no patch or change to tztab.

This may not be true for Java. They have names for cities.

As far as ctime(3) is concerned, you can't ever change timezones, only DST start and ends. If you use TZ=VET4:30, you can't get the right time for times in the past. With Java's scheme, it should work.