Thanks to a temporary order from congress, the Daylight Savings dates this year are totally different. This basically screwed up everything that takes care of DST automatically – cell phones, laptops, my TiVo, etc.  The other thing it did was really mess with some of our Linux servers. Luckily, it’s an easy fix _if_ you know what to do and where to look.

TechRepublic has a great article on how to fix the daylight savings time issue that helped a lot.

Basically, you need to do the following:

  # wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007b.tar.gz’
# tar -xzvf tzdata2007b.tar.gz
# zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
# cd zoneinfo
# cp -r * /usr/share/zoneinfo/

  # zdump -v /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT | grep 2007
(making sure that the two Mar 11 and Nov 4 entries are there).

  # ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT /etc/localtime

And that’s it.  Not too dificult and keeps your linux box running with the correct internal UTC time.