Re: time sync? time servers give wrong time

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.setup, in article
<slrnftjl5s.6ui.keeling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, s. keeling wrote:

John Hasler <john@xxxxxxxxxx>:

Ken Williams writes:

where on slackware 10 can I specify EST in my /etc. Everything was fine
until recently (sunday march 9 I think).

Comment: While the older timezone names such as 'EST' (which does NOT
use Daylight Savings Time) or the slightly more appropriate 'EST5EDT'
(which does use DST, but under US rules) are still supported by the
NIST tzdata files, it is _really_ preferred to use the 'region/city'
zonefiles, such as 'America/Montreal' or 'America/Toronto' which follow
the national rules appropriate to your country.

Slackware 10 is rather old, I believe. You probably need to update your

Indeed. June, 2004 (distrowatch.com).

zoneinfo. The problem is not with Netdate. The problem is that
your system does not know that we switch to DST three weeks earlier
than we used to.

What is funny is that this change was implemented back in the spring of
2006 (not sure which revision, but it was certainly in tzdata2006n.tar.gz)
and went into effect in 2007. Up-thread, 'Grant <g_r_a_n_t_@xxxxxxxxxxx>'
shows a changelog entry which updated to tzdata2007k (which was published
by NIST on Dec 31 15:25, 2007). This tzdata file has been replaced by
tzdata2008a (which was published by NIST on Mar 8 10:42, 2008) but that
revision only changes the date Chile reverts to standard time in the year
2008 only (and includes the latest announcement from the IERS that there
will NOT be a leap-second change at the end of June 2008).

This seems to be the biggest problem for the noobs I help. I hammer
it in that they have to keep up to date on security fixes, but it's
like pulling teeth to get them to do it.

Agree completely. The comparable Fedora Linux release was FC2 (5/16/04)
As distributed, it had 1618 packages. 26 months later at End-Of-Life,
the errata server had 741 packages available for update. Now before
some start spouting distribution advocacy, wander over to ftp.kernel.org
and look in the /pub/linux/v2.6/ directory for the same period, and
you'll find there were 76 v2.6.x kernel releases. In both cases, the
changes reflect improvements, added features, bug and security fixes
and so on. Linux (and the Linux distributors) do not follow the
microsoft model of a quarterly software update, but fix problems
right away, even if the change is of minor nature that may only be
important to a few users.

A distro that's four years old and which hasn't been updated is a sick
system waiting to blow up.

This is sort of like the windoze user whose system was barely usable
because it had so many viruses/trojans/spyware installed. When asked
why the user hadn't installed the various anti-mal-ware programs
(even the "free" ones available on the Internet), the user replied
that "there was a demo version of Norton installed on this win98 box
when it was bought [used] six years earlier - what more was needed?"
Would _you_ have been able to answer without laughing for 5 minutes?

Old guy
.

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