July 22, 2003
No time for this crap...
Grrr, sometimes I hate linux. Yeah, yeah, one distribution versus another and upgrades and all that crap... save it, I don't want to hear it. The box runs what it runs and I've no influence over making it change.
The crux of the latest problem was screwups on calculating timestamp shifts from local to UTC and back. Apparently the lame-ass versions of the sh-utils and util-linux RPMs were broken. An upgrade of them to more current releases solved the problem.
So after I spent several hours wrestling with a machine thinking it's hardware clock or timezone configs where wrong, nooooooooo, it's just the damned /bin/date program!
Well, I post the results of my travails here in hopes it'll help some poor bastard suffering the same troubles as they're searching Google for an answer. If you're searching for "timezone hwclock date linux wrong" you'll hopefully get this page among the other bajillion-or-so nearly useless results.
Be sure your utils are up to date. Especially if the box isn't running a recent distribution release. And oh yeah, take great care when you upgrade RPMs. It's possible to make things worse. You have been warned.
