Daylight savings time / 6.1 and 4.11
Pete Slagle
freebsd-questions at voidcaptain.com
Sun Jan 21 04:52:45 UTC 2007
Matthew Seaman wrote:
> [You could make /etc/localtime a link or a symlink to the appropriate
> file under /usr/share/zoneinfo, but only if /etc and /usr/share/zoneinfo
> happen to be on the same filesystem (ie. on the root filesystem), which
> is not the case in the default install of FreeBSD]
As you suggest, making /etc/localtime a symlink ensures that the current
/usr/share/zoneinfo file is always the one that actually gets used.
That's an easy and significant benefit. So, why not do this on all
boxes, even those that have / and /usr under separate filesystems?
Granted, localtime will be unreadable whenever /usr is not mounted, but
is that really a problem? Typically it will only be an issue at
boot-time and in single user mode. The current time and file system
times will be displayed in UTC, but this is only a small temporary
inconvenience for the operator. Cron might not do its work as expected,
but it is unlikely to be running in circumstances where /usr is not
mounted. Perhaps some log files might be affected, but if /usr isn't
mounted, then /var probably isn't either.
Have I missed some big potential problem that might outweigh the benefit
of using the symlink even when /etc/localtime and /usr/share/zoneinfo
are on separate filesystems?
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