[SGVLUG] hmm, why are my posts back-dated??

[David Lawyer]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 12:08:42PM +0000, Sean O'Donnell wrote:
> Christopher Smith pointed out that my last post was back-dated.
> 
> I'm not quite sure what's causing this...
> 
> The 'date' command on my local machine returns: Mon Feb 12 11:48:20 UTC 2007
> 
> The 'date' command on my web/email server returns: Mon Feb 12 12:50:48
> MST 2007
> 
> The date/time of my last post says: /Mon Feb 12 03:18:52 PST 2007
This looks OK since our time is UTC - 8. 
> //
> /Could it be because my local machine is set to UTC?

Years ago I found that I needed to set my PC hardware clock to UTC in
order for the system time to automatically switch to-from daylight
savings time.  You see, your PC has 2 clocks, the hardware one that
runs off the battery when you powerdown and the system clock that is
used for the date command and to supply dates for your emails and file
creation time, etc.  When you power up, the system clock gets it's
time from the hardware clock (not exactly -- on my PC software makes a
correction for drift of my hardware clock since it doesn't keep
accurate time) using the hwclock program with my modified
configuration script.

I've filed a number of Debian bug reports about the scripts and the
documentation and the result was that I was eventually invited to
become the maintainer but I refused --no time.

So even if the hw clock is UTC, the system clock should automatically
be Los Angeles time since that should be in /etc/timezone.  In Debian,
my /etc/default/rcS has: UTC=yes.  It's used by startup scripts
which source it and wind up with an environment variable UTC which has
the value "yes".

> I honestly don't know how it got set to UTC, as I normally set it to
> PST, but I'll sort that too.
			David Lawyer