All.
About a fortnight ago an older (RedHat 9) server started to run
some processes 5 hours late. We are in the "Europe/London"
timezone, currently in GMT and the TZ environment variable is
being correctly set in /etc/profile. Despite (as a last resort)
a reboot, the cron tasks are going off at 9am not 4am and the
even the maillog contains obvious process-different timestamps,
vis excerpt:

Nov 6 09:37:18 man1 sendmail[7703]: kA693YVO007703: from=root,
size=417, class=0, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<200611060903.kA693YVO007703@******.co.uk>, rel
ay=root@localhost
Nov 6 04:37:18 man1 sendmail[7922]: kA69bI0U007922:
from=<root@******.co.uk>, size=714, class=0, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<200611060903.kA693YVO007703@******.co.uk>, proto=ESMTP,
daemon=MTA, relay=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
Nov 6 09:37:18 man1 sendmail[7703]: kA693YVO007703: to=root,
ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:33:44, xdelay=00:00:00,
mailer=relay, pri=30417, relay=[127.0.0.1
] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (kA69bI0U007922 Message
accepted for delivery)
Nov 6 04:37:21 man1 sendmail[7923]: kA69bI0U007922:
to=administrators@******.co.uk, ctladdr=<root@******.co.uk>
(0/0), delay=00:00:03, xdelay=0
0:00:03, mailer=relay, pri=30959, relay=******.co.uk
[200.200.200.2], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (kA69bI5I005319 Message
accepted for delivery)

Which looks like the sendmail process has the correct "temporal
view"!! but not cron.

Any ideas?

Tim Clarke

server started to run some processes 5 hours late.
So you checked for what things that changed up to a fortnight ago?


older (RedHat 9) server
RHL, EOL'd in 2004, Fedora Legacy support, etc, etc. You know the drill, right?

Hehe and I thought I was being explicit.

I checked everything TZ related that I could think of; startup scripts, env vars /etc/localtime file hw time. No joy. Yeah I know its EOL and just about to be upgraded but there *has* to be a simple answer to this that's not a re-install/upgrade/package/blah issue?

Hmmm...seems that creating an /etc/timezone file will do the trick:

su -c "echo Europe/London > /etc/timezone"

Can't find documentation on that at first attempt. Will go away and dig. Also try to work out why three other boxes (some different RH distros, granted) have no file either but no problem.....

Hehe and I thought I was being explicit.
Yeah, you've been thorough on a different plane, different train of thought. I'm thinking that if a system operates "as advertised" w/o interruption then if changes occur they can be contributed to either human intervention (good or bad) or say upgrades. So what I was thinking was tracking changes by looking for files with changed MAC times and recent updates...


Yeah I know its EOL and just about to be upgraded but there *has* to be a simple answer to this that's not a re-install/upgrade/package/blah issue?
Sure is.


Hmmm...seems that creating an /etc/timezone file will do the trick:
su -c "echo Europe/London > /etc/timezone"
LOL. Never heard of /etc/timezone.

I do know TZ skew between apps usually can be contributed to a problem with /etc/localtime (Glibc). Fix that by slinking: "ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime". For other typical probs you'd check /etc/sysconfig/clock: "grep ^ZONE= /etc/sysconfig/clock" should show your TZ as "Europe/London".


BTW: there's an edit button so you can edit your post and add info.

> Yeah, you've been thorough on a different plane, different train
> of thought. I'm thinking that if a system operates "as advertised"
> w/o interruption then if changes occur they can be contributed to
> either human intervention (good or bad) or say upgrades. So what I was
> thinking was tracking changes by looking for files with changed MAC
> times and recent updates...

Me thorough? lol. Well I did start at exactly that point but got no changes that I could obviously trace to this prob :-( So I started from scratch with tz configuration. Gotta be simple I thought...

> LOL. Never heard of /etc/timezone.

lol - suggestion from another list - can't find man or docs on it either....

> I do know TZ skew between apps usually can be contributed to a problem
> with /etc/localtime (Glibc). Fix that by slinking: "ln -sf
> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime". For other typical
> probs you'd check /etc/sysconfig/clock: "grep ^ZONE=
> /etc/sysconfig/clock" should show your TZ as "Europe/London".

Skew? Nope, ntp fine and we're not talking even a few minutes here. 5 hours dead different it was.

> BTW: there's an edit button so you can edit your post and add info.?

ooo shiny



Thread closable now, crystal ball still required for reason....thanks unSpawn!