[MLUG] The DST bug - worse than Y2K?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Well, Y2K was a bear for a lot of programmers all over the world, I'm 
sure, but it didn't affect me much.  Now, a day before we change over to 
daylight savings time (DST), I'm a little concerned.  Most of my computers 
will be fine -- a Red Hat box and a bunch of Win XP boxes will all deal 
with it appropriately.  No worries there.  On the other hand, I have two 
things that I'm not sure I can handle correctly.  One is my Solaris box. 
The other is my DirecTiVo machine.  I'll save the DirecTiVo issue for the 
discussion list, but if one of you here knows something about that and you 
aren't on the discussion list, feel free to write to me.

The way UNIX systems deal with time, apparently, is by setting the correct 
UTC time and they then use that in combination with other information to 
decide what times to use for various things.  That other information is 
stored in /etc/default/init (at least on Solaris).  Example:

# @(#)init.dfl 1.5 99/05/26
#
# This file is /etc/default/init.  /etc/TIMEZONE is a symlink to this file.
# This file looks like a shell script, but it is not.  To maintain
# compatibility with old versions of /etc/TIMEZONE, some shell constructs
# (i.e., export commands) are allowed in this file, but are ignored.
#
# Lines of this file should be of the form VAR=value, where VAR is one of
# TZ, LANG, CMASK, or any of the LC_* environment variables.
#
TZ=US/Central
CMASK=022
LC_COLLATE=en_US.ISO8859-1
LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_MONETARY=en_US.ISO8859-1
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.ISO8859-1
LC_TIME=en_US.ISO8859-1


Maybe I can make a change in TZ and reboot to get it to work right, but 
that is a very undesirable solution.  There must be a better way.

I hear that Solaris was selling a patch for this for thousands of dollars. 
My IT people have done nothing for me.  They are going around talking to 
secretaries and patching their old NT boxes (as if that would matter).  So 
here I am, one day before the event and I don't know how to fix this.

In other words, for me, this is *way* worse than Y2K.

Mike

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