Sunday, 05 June 2005

So I noticed that the timezone on these puppies at work was wrong, so I went about trying to fix it. I happened upon this page in German, which after translation (thanks Babel Fish!), I managed to decipher the following:

The factory default contents of /etc/TIMEZONE are:

GST+7DST+6,M4.1.0,M10.5.0

and what I believe to be the desired contents for Australia/NSW or ACT:

EST+10EDT+11,M10.5.0/02:00,M3.4.0/03:00

From my understanding, translates to something like "The default timezone is GMT+10, but when we're in daylight saving time we want GMT+11. Daylight saving kicks in on the last Sunday of the tenth month at 2am and ends on the last Sunday of the third month at 3am." (So M10.5.0 means "day zero of week 5 of month 10). I presume this is a BusyBox thing. The things people do to save space.

Update

It's a uClibc thing. Some good documentation on the TZ variable is at http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html

Update

I swear drugs are involved here. I had to use

EST-10,EDT-11,M10.5.0/02:00,M3.5.0/03:00

to get things to work as expected, which from my interpretation of some other documentation, really means I'm saying we're 10 hours behind UTC, which isn't the case, but yields a correct time. Go figure.