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Hi

How can we change the TIMEZONE on the fly,
without any System reboot...

thanks

Jordan Catalano wrote:
> Hi
>
> How can we change the TIMEZONE on the fly, without any System
> reboot...
>
> thanks
>

Simple answer: "You can't"

More complex answer: "You can change TIMEZONE (by which I assme you mean
the value specified in /etc/default/init) as much as you like but the
init process will only read that file once when it initially starts up
(effectively, when the machine is booted). The timezone value read by
init is inherited by all processes started by init (and their children,
even unto the umpteenth generation) unless they are told otherwise.

Since TZ is simply an environment variable threre's nothing
to stop you changing it on a per-user basis (put a value for TZ in the
user's .profile or .login) or on a per-process basis *for new starts of
processes* (ie you can't change the TZ for an already-running process).

For example:

$ echo $TZ
GB
$ TZ=Australia/Queensland date
Wednesday April 14 21:35:37 EST 2004
$ TZ=US/Eastern date
Wednesday April 14 07:35:40 EDT 2004
$

So theoretically you could kill off things (such as cron) for which you
wanted to change the timezone (you *would* have to kill them though) and
restart each one with an explicitly-specified TZ. Experience tells that
This Way Lies Madness, though - don't even think about it.

--
Tony

In comp.unix.solaris Jordan Catalano <cypherpunks@sicap.ch> wrote:
> Hi

> How can we change the TIMEZONE on the fly,
> without any System reboot...

The timezone is a per-process environment variable. For each process
that you care about, you can either ask it to change it's timezone (if
it supports such a concept), or you could restart it with the TZ
environment set to what you want.

Such things that you might want to restart that way could be...

cron
syslog
inetd
sshd
applications (apache, oracle, ...)

Restarting inetd often has other problems unless you purge the
environment of everything you don't need.

--
Darren Dunham ddunham@taos.com
Senior Technical Consultant TAOS http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper? San Francisco, CA bay area
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