Daylight Savings Time

Duncan Gibson drg at rlvd.UUCP
Wed Jan 8 04:54:06 AEST 1986


[from my original...]
Last year I did some work with the "Newcastle Connection" ...
... One system took "British Summer Time" (BST) into account, and the other
ran GMT. I can remember being incredibly confused when I copied a file from
one machine to the other and did an 'ls -l' on it only to find that it wasn't
due for creation for another hour (:-))

[from George D M Ross' reply...]
... Perhaps this is a "feature" of the Newcastle Connection, or perhaps it's
just ctime that's broken.

[and a quick followup by me...]

It has been pointed out that (thanks Robert) that as Unix internals are in GMT
as long as the two machines are running synchronised GMT then this is not a
problem. That is the point: when I set the date I used *my* local time, ie I
typed in the time as given by the trusty wrist watch, without bothering to
convert to GMT, so the two machines were not running synchronised GMT.

There was a smiley on my original, but to stop the flames...

The Newcastle Connection certainly provides the user with a distributed 
environment, and it's pretty amazing to use a multi-machine Un*x system.
Like a single machine Un*x system, there is no escaping an idiot user, so
if the administrator can't read his watch, what else do you expect :-)

-- 
UUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!rlvd!drg JANET: drg at uk.ac.rl.vc ARPA: drg%rl.vc at ucl.cs.arpa



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