Strange time zone displayed in CentOS 6.7

orbegonzo · 06-26-2017, 06:56 AM

Hi everyone,

Some time ago, I installed Centos 6.7 Minimal on seven computers at the office. During the installation process, I set the timezone to "Chile/Santiago" using the installation assistant, and I disabled the use of UTC. I also configured the NTP service.

Everything worked OK for months, but last week, when I ran a certain programme in one of the computers, I did realise that there was a one hour offset in the date displayed in the programme logs. I ran the programme in the other six computers, and there was no problem regarding the date displayed.

At first I thought that maybe the system time was wrong, so I checked it, and this is what I got:

Code:

#date
Mon Jun 26 07:38:11 -04 2017

The date is right, but I'm surprised about the time zone, because it shows "-4", instead of "CLT", which is the time zone that the other computers display:

Code:

#date
Mon Jun 26 07:39:13 CLT 2017

I don't if that would be the origin of the problem (since technically CLT should be equivalent to -4), but still, I don't understand why the displayed differs. I have tried to sync the time using NTP and to update the tzdata package, but the time zone keeps the same.

Any idea about why the time zone is different?

Best regards.

Demosa · 06-26-2017, 11:36 AM

This is going to be a little bit crazy/out there but... chile and time zones. -4 means not observing daylight savings time, just a fixed time zone. CLT implies observing daylight savings time (or in Chilean terms, summer and winter time).

And well, who knows what time it is in Chile? (For the curious, the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Chile highlights some of the time changes, which are very chaotic by modern timezone standards)

So... no idea, really. It depends on when your installation media was created.

Look in /etc/sysconfig/clock and see what the ZONE entry is in each server. My guess would be that something's different in there.

Habitual · 06-29-2017, 04:28 PM

Compare with

Code:

export TZ=America/Los_Angeles ; date

orbegonzo · 06-30-2017, 03:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Habitual

Compare with

Code:

export TZ=America/Los_Angeles ; date

Hello,

This is what I get:

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# export TZ=America/Los_Angeles ; date
Fri Jun 30 01:39:43 PDT 2017

If then I set the Chile/Santiago time again, the result is the same as before:

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# export TZ=America/Santiago ; date
Fri Jun 30 04:41:17 -04 2017

I have also checked that in the rest of the the computers (which work OK), the value of TZ is empty.

Best regards