On Apr 17, 2013, at 10:18 AM, Moshe Katz <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Moshe Katz wrote:
> >
> > Did you reboot the machine after you changed the time zone? As I
> > understand it, many system components don't see the change unless you
> > restart them, and the easiest way to restart them all is to restart the
> > machine.
>
> Is that true?
> That's stone age. That's interrupting. That's simply bad.
> Isn't that the bussiness of another OS?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Cristian
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>
> Cristian,
>
> It is simply because many programs only read the system time when they start
> running.
> This is a design choice that has to do with efficiency of checking the system
> clock, which I've been told was slow on many older and/or embedded systems.
The time zone is only a means of affecting the output of time on the system.
Internally, the FreeBSD kernel keeps time as UTC. Under FreeBSD, the presence
of the file /etc/wall_cmos_clock indicates the hardware CMOS clock (i.e., the
one you see in the "BIOS settings") is set to the local time zone (and hence
local time). FreeBSD then uses adjkerntz to convert local time to UTC and to
reflect back time zone changes to the CMOS clock when instructed.
Unless I've missed something, it seems like pfSense assumes the CMOS clock is
always set to UTC. In that case, changing time zone is just a matter of
setting /etc/localtime to the appropriate entry in /usr/share/zoneinfo. AFAIK,
unless you override it with an explicit TZ setting, library calls to format
dates ultimately default to the time zone pointed to by /etc/localtime. In
such a case, changing time zone should get picked up seamlessly by running
daemons, without need for reboot.
> The "other OS" it sounds like you are referring to actually does a better job
> with changing times. That is because things like cron ("Scheduled Tasks")
> and syslog ("Event Viewer") are much more closely integrated into the
> Operating System. In contrast, those components on *nix systems are
> completely independent of the OS.
On FreeBSD, cron and syslog are definitely part of the base OS.
Cheers,
Paul._______________________________________________
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