[CentOS] UTC vs local time

[Alain Spineux]

On 8/23/07, Steve Berg <sberg at mississippi.com> wrote:
>
> Simon Jolle wrote:
> > Hi list
> >
> > I always configure my systems to use our local time (in my case
> > /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich) and disable UTC.
> >
> > What are the differences between UTC and local time? What are their
> > respective advantages and disadvantages?
> >
> > When to use UTC?
> >
> > cheers
> > Simon
> >
> >
> Not sure if Zurich has any sort of Daylight Savings like we do here in
> the US but that is one good reason to use UTC.  Since our clocks shift
> by an hour twice a year it can make log files confusing and have other
> side effects.  Using UTC you get a standard time that never shifts.
> (Except for the odd leap second every so often.)  Personally I use UTC
> on my home system and let my shell convert it to my local time zone.
> For servers that I manage I always use UTC to avoid the one hour shifts
> of DST.



My understanding of UTC is different :-).
For me the only thing changing is the time the hardware/BIOS clock
maintains.
At boot time the kernel read the hwclock apply the local->UTC conversion if
required and
work only and in any case in UTC. Then application like date, ls, syslog
make conversion
to localtime when printing time to the user using TZ environement variable
or /etc/localtime


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-- 
Alain Spineux
aspineux gmail com
May the sources be with you
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