Re: SCO 5.0.5/5.0.6 bios clock, time zone and synching

From: Bela Lubkin (belal_at_sco.com)
Date: 07/30/03 

Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 08:06:25 GMT
To: scomsc@xenitec.ca

John Smith wrote:

> Does SCO expect the BIOS clock to be set to UTC?
>
> Ive got a few SCO boxen spread across a couple of time zones and at
> the moment, the bios clocks in the servers are set to localtime not
> UTC.
> The timezone settings in SCO Admin are also wrong.
>
> I was under the impression *nix always expects the BIOS clock to be
> set to UTC and then the timezone settings in SCO tell the OS what the
> local time is.
> This does not seem to be the case for me.
> On a testing box, Ive set the BIOS clock to UTC, set the correct
> timezone in scoadmin but the date command in a root shell still gives
> the wrong time.
>
> Either the timezone information in scoadmin for my timezone is wrong
> and I need to set up an unlisted timezone (which I can do easily
> enough) or im missing something more fundamental here.
>
> Anyone care to wield a clue-bat?

Yes: you left out all numeric values. You say the timezone was wrong
with the BIOS clock set to localtime, and it was wrong with the BIOS
clock set to UTC. So OK, it's always wrong -- by what offset? Show
actual examples (and don't make them up, capture real values from actual
problematic systems).

I think in 506 it actually tries to tell whether the BIOS is in UTC or
localtime. Earlier releases probably did always expect UTC.

Regardless of the BIOS, once Unix is up and running, it keeps UTC time
internally. Anything that asks "what time is it?", whether in the
kernel or a user program, gets its answer in UTC. User processes have
by convention an environment variable, $TZ, that tells them what the
_user_ expects to see. Two users logged into the same system, ssh'd
from Poland and Tonga, will have set their $TZ differently. As long as
the kernel's UTC reference time is correct, when those users ask to see
a time, it will be correct for their local timezone.

Your statement "The timezone settings in SCO Admin are also wrong." is
especially unclear. SCOAdmin has many tentacles; tell exactly what
you've invoked. Is it `scoadmin system time manager`? Then, how is it
wrong? It pretty much just does what you tell it to do. If you specify
a timezone in that scoadmin module, that's the timezone you should get
by default on subsequent logins. It writes the setting into
/etc/TIMEZONE, which is processed by user login scripts; this sets the
system-wide default timezone, used by daemons and by users who don't
explicitly override it.

>Bela<

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