Timezone Query

[John Walker_1]

Can anyone tell me the timezone I should be using for a server in Montevideo in Uruguay?
It is currently using SAT5 as its timezone, as it is located in Bogota, Columbia, but I need to configure the timezone in an application used by Montevideo. There is no entry for SAT in /usr/lib/tztab so im not too sure how it is setting the time.

[spex]

John,

Standard time zone: UTC/GMT -3 hours
No daylight saving time at the moment

More info on Montevideo:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=163

PCS

[Fabio Ettore]

Hi John,

you can consider NTP. In that way you should still have the timezone for Bogota but the NTP obtains the date from NTP server.

Just a thought...

Best regards,
Fabio

[Matti_Kurkela]

NTP is good but does not help in this case, because NTP always works in terms of UTC time only.

Converting UTC to local time is always the responsibility of the server OS: NTP just takes care that the underlying UTC time is correct.

If there is no entry for your current timezone in /usr/lib/tztab, the number in the TZ timezone specification tells the UTC offset value directly. (See "man environ")

So, SAT5 would mean "UTC value minus 5 hours". If you want, you can add your own timezone definition to /usr/lib/tztab: see "man tztab" for that.

Remember that you *can* use a different TZ value for any process, if necessary. The TZ was defined as an environment variable just for this purpose: if you remote-access a server located in a different timezone from you, you could change the TZ variable for your session and have all the times displayed according to your local timezone.

If you do this, remember that system-wide things like cron jobs will always be triggered according to the server's "default" timezone (the one specified in /etc/TIMEZONE) unless someone e.g. edits the startup script for cron daemon to use a specific time zone.

[Fabio Ettore]

Hi,

John, could you let us know which solution do you apply, if any?

Best regards,
Fabio