TimeZone Matching between HP-UX ,Linux and AIX

[Ayman D. Jweinat]

my problem that i have an application depending on syncronizing of the time between four types of OS , i have HP-UX , Linux and AIX unix and i need them to have the same time and date all over the year ,,,

i am centered in Amman , Jordan
HP-UX Timezone Can be defined as Amman-3 as unlisted time zone from the timezone list,

Linux Can be defined as Amman which is OK

AIX unix i have no idea about how to configure the time zone as? so i configured it as saudi arabia time zone which is mismatched with daylight saving procedure between JORDAN and Saudi Arabia times , and this caused problems for me ???

i need a help to configure the three systems with the same time and keep in mind the daylight saving procedure for all togather in order to match the date and time for them all over the year

Please Help

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Ayman,

I would suggest for AIX, picking the best possible timezone or creating a custom time zone according to IBM's procedures. This should be possible.

Then the AIX servers should use the NTP service to pick up actual time from a Linux or HP-UX machine, whichever has the proper time zone for your(our) region. Seems like Linux is the way to go.

You may still yet have trouble, but this approach seems most likely to minimize it.

Time Zone issues in our region seem difficult due to lack of support from the OS vendors for the various time zones and in my case the governments inability to decide when clocks should change from year to year.

HP-UX does have the ability to customize the actual change of time zone to deal with local legislation. If you do a search you will see there are a lot of similar issues in Austrailian IT shops, no doubt due to government decisions.

There may be some help from others in your region on the AIX issue:

Some links:
http://unix.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/ibm-aix-l/10/2002
http://www.ksu.ru/eng/general/index.htm

You might get away with using Moscow time zone, but check this thoroughly.

I recommend a call to IBM in Jordon or the nearest office to your location.


Good Luck.

SEP

[Allan Bowman]

You may also consider using GMT on all machines. This of course is not practical if you have a lot of users who would get confused or if you interface to other local systems.

I recently managed a network of systems across the United States. In order to simplify things, we standardized all systems to use Eastern time no matter what time zone they were in. This way the common data collection system didn't have to worry about which day to put data into at midnight.

Allan in Atlanta

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Bear in mind that multiple TZ settings are possible even on a single machine. You might have users connected from all over the world each with his own TZ setting. The system internally just counts seconds since 00:00:00 1-Jan-1970 UTC. I suspect that your least evil option is to use TZ=GMT0 on all the boxes so that there is possibility of confusion and no day light saving/summer time transitions.