Different process times?

[Tim Clarke]

All.
About a fortnight ago an older (RedHat 9) server started to run
some processes 5 hours late. We are in the "Europe/London"
timezone, currently in GMT and the TZ environment variable is
being correctly set in /etc/profile. Despite (as a last resort)
a reboot, the cron tasks are going off at 9am not 4am and the
even the maillog contains obvious process-different timestamps,
vis excerpt:

Nov 6 09:37:18 man1 sendmail[7703]: kA693YVO007703: from=root,
size=417, class=0, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<200611060903.kA693YVO007703@******.co.uk>, rel
ay=root@localhost
Nov 6 04:37:18 man1 sendmail[7922]: kA69bI0U007922:
from=, size=714, class=0, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<200611060903.kA693YVO007703@******.co.uk>, proto=ESMTP,
daemon=MTA, relay=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
Nov 6 09:37:18 man1 sendmail[7703]: kA693YVO007703: to=root,
ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:33:44, xdelay=00:00:00,
mailer=relay, pri=30417, relay=[127.0.0.1
] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (kA69bI0U007922 Message
accepted for delivery)
Nov 6 04:37:21 man1 sendmail[7923]: kA69bI0U007922:
to=administrators@******.co.uk, ctladdr=
(0/0), delay=00:00:03, xdelay=0
0:00:03, mailer=relay, pri=30959, relay=******.co.uk
[200.200.200.2], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (kA69bI5I005319 Message
accepted for delivery)

Which looks like the sendmail process has the correct "temporal
view"!! but not cron.

Any ideas?

Tim Clarke

[Frank de Vries]

/etc/profile is session level.
cron and mail don't use the profile

did you specify TZ in /etc/TIMEZONE for
machine level,

[Tim Clarke]

> etc/profile is session level.
> cron and mail don't use the profile

Ah that's news, thanks

> did you specify TZ in /etc/TIMEZONE for
machine level,

This machine's never had that file and I can't find one on any other (much more recent!) Fedora boxen. A quick man search on "timezone" and "TIMEZONE" yields nothing, but:

[root@man1 etc]# echo Europe/London > timezone
[root@man1 etc]# ls -l timezone
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14 Nov 8 17:18 timezone

Plus restarting services looks like it did the trick! Thanks! What's going to eat me now is that the other 3 Linux boxes here don't have the file *or* the problem.....

[Tim Clarke]

Closing thread.