FreeBSD 6.0 cron is running on GMT

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2005-Nov-26 22:27:49 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
>I am wondering if I shouldn't just redo everything in the system that
>has to do with time zones and time keeping (deleting files and re-creating
>them if need be), reboot, and see what happens.

That's as good as idea as any other.  I know cron on my 6.0 system
behaves correctly so I suspect it's something odd on your system.

Last suggestions/guesses:
- If you run "/sbin/rcorder -s nostart /etc/rc.d/*", does /etc/rc.d/cron
  come after /etc/rc.d/adjkerntz?
- If /etc/localtime is a symlink, is the filesystem it points to mounted
  when cron starts?  (Look thru the rcorder above to check).
- Do "at" jobs run at local or UTC time?
- If you run "date" and "date -u" as a cron job, what do they report?

> I've never seen a good
>explanation of all of the sysctl variables, environment variables, files,
>etc. that control it, especially since (as I understand it) the responsibility
>has been shifted from the kernel to libraries. Is there a summary out there?

The timezone has always been the responsibility of userland in FreeBSD.
The kernel provides a UTC timestamp to the ctime(3) functions, which
are solely responsible to mapping UTC to local time based on $TZ or
/etc/localtime.

adjkerntz(8) is responsible for handling the RTC's offset between UTC
and localtime.  If /etc/wall_cmos_clock exists, it means that CMOS clock
keeps local time.  If that file does not exist, it means that the CMOS
clock keeps UTC time.  adjkerntz sets machdep.wall_cmos_clock.

-- 
Peter Jeremy