FreeBSD 5.3 and DST
March 15th, 2007 by Hans Kaspersetz in New Jersey
It has come to our attention that some people are still experiencing trouble with FreeBSD 5.3 and DST. We dealt with a little trouble ourselves. We developed and maintain some very time sensitive web applications for our clients. Two examples of our work come to mind: the reservation system we developed for Bering Air and the medication reminder software for OnCellRx. In both cases the time stamps and the delivery of messages need to happen at the right time and the DST change could have really caused problems. The OS, PHP, MySQL and the NTP server all need to play nicely together and they didn’t.
In our case the NTP server we rely on at Columbia didn’t get patched properly and at the time of the publishing of this post it is still 1 hour off. That should remind everyone, be aware of who you are relying on. Even reputable institutions make mistakes.
We also had a little trouble with our FreeBSD 5.3 installations. So a New Jersey web development firm went looking for a fix and wanted to tell you about it. You need to patch the zoneinfo file on your server. Our server displayed the wrong time when we used the date command and to get the server to show the right time we had to put it in the wrong time zone. So we applied this FreeBSD DST patch found here: http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-07:04.zoneinfo.asc.
The patch says it was only tested against 6.1 but it worked nicely on our 5.3 machine.