[NCLUG] Daylight Saving Time, and free unices

[Bob Proulx]

mike loseke wrote:
> A few of these systems don't have any timezone capability at all.

Wow.

> Luckily, the translated time isn't tied to anything critical, like
> databases or build processes, so we can get away with manually
> adjusting the time on them.

If anyone really gets into a DST pinch they can always set the machine
to UTC until the old DST would have kicked in normally.  In fact in
those cases I would be inclined to leave the machine in UTC mode to
avoid any future time issues.  That should always work because UTC is
always correct.

> As the manufacturers - if they still exist - no longer support both
> the OS and the hardware, we're pretty much left to our own devices
> to resolve the issue.

Is this a linux distro?  Or simply other random Unix vendors?

> Simple enough to do, just a point to share as an example of some
> systems that can't be updated and in some cases would cause damage
> if they were tampered with too much.

I suspect that you are talking about commercial unix vendors and not
linux distro vendors though.  In the case of a commercial unix vendor
I am in full agreement.  For a linux distro I think I would look
seriously into upgrading.

As an example at my work a number people had in the past installed
Libranet because they had a simpler installer.  Libranet is now out of
business.  But Libranet was a Debian based distro with the latest most
similar version being the Woody version.  I have successfully upgraded
several of them to Debian Sarge.  The biggest issue I found was that
Libranet had released Gnome version 2 as 'gnome2' and in Sarge it is
simply 'gnome'.  Removing it first, performing a normal upgrade, then
installing 'gnome' to get Gnome 2 again worked pretty well.

Bob