How to Change the Time Zone Rules?

Martin McCormick martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu
Fri Jul 28 15:14:10 UTC 2006


	The rules for determining the yearly start and end of
daylight saving time in the United States have changed beginning
in March of 2007.  All the FreeBSD systems I am in charge of need
new rules and I read an article that mentions FreeBSD and Linux
and the /usr/share/zoneinfo data base which I found.  In that
directory are subdirectories for the continents and many binaries
describing the rules for major cities or islands.  /etc/localtime
is a copy of whichever locality file in /usr/share/zoneinfo
correctly mirrors one's local time.

	The problem, as I see it, is that we need a new America
file.  I ran across an article that referenced

ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2006h.tar.gz

	Which turns out to be the source file for making all the
location files.

	My question is, How do I get there from here?  That file
is obviously #included or otherwise used in something you make to
generate the objects.  Has this already been done somewhere for
FreeBSD and will it work on systems ranging from FreeBSD4.7 up to
5.4?

	I use FreeBSD on our domain name and dhcp servers and
want to get them ready well before this mini Y2K-like situation
hits.

	Many thanks.

	For those who may be wondering, DST ends as it has for
many years, on the last Sunday in October so the new rules don't
take effect until March 11 of 2007.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group


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