In case you don’t know, there’s a change in the air—the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time have changed. I don’t know about Windows machines, but I imagine they’ll be easy to update.
According to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Savings Time starting in 2007 begins on the second Sunday of March, and ends on the first Sunday of November.
How do you know if your Linux box will handle the time change properly? There’s a simple command: zdump -v America/Los_Angeles | grep 2007. If you don’t see Sun Mar 11 and Sun Nov 4, you’re not going to switch over correctly. Obviously, you’ll want to swap out your own timezone name for mine.
Fortunately, it’s a simple process to update. Get yourself a copy of a current tzdata file, then follow these simple directions:
tar zxvf tzdata2007a.tar.gz zic northamerica zic backward
If you’re not in North America, run zic on your file instead. A second run of zdump -v America/Los_Angeles | grep 2007 should now net you the proper dates.
See, isn’t Linux fun?