Ready for DST?

Daylight Savings Time in the US. Is it the end of the world again March 11th 2007? For most of us our Linux boxes will be just fine. The DST change has been fixed in most modern Linux Distros. But if you are still using your 2.4 kernel based ancient distro, you may want to look into fixing it. That isn’t what this tip is about rather proof that your box is going to make the switch. You should see this when you run the zdump command below:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 08:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 MST isdst=0 gmtoff=-25200
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 09:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 MDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 MDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 MST isdst=0 gmtoff=-25200

If you are seeing this then you probably need to fix it some year:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime Sun Apr 1 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
/etc/localtime Sun Apr 1 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Oct 28 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime Sun Oct 28 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600

At first when I found this tidbit I thought I would be just fine since I run my NTP service to keep good time. Well this technically doesn’t correct your computers time. The kernel clock uses UTC time not DST. Your computer only translates the DST from UTC time by the TZ database as shown above. So NTP only changes local time not system time.

Certificate Hell

Yeah I’m gonna burn out doing blogs soon enough. But I have so much to say! Earlier was just a follow up to yesterday so here is what I’ve been working on since noon.

Well last year around Thanksgiving my email server secure certificates expired and so I dreaded having to re-learn how to do this. I figured renewing would be cake. I really couldn’t find much in howto’s for doing this. So last year I just created a new one and oddly with an expired CA to the best of my knowledge. At any rate I just did a one year since I figured I would/should have upgraded or moved on by this time now. Trust me I have been trying to but very slowly. So I found a howto for renewing your certs. First off I followed the directions and all was swell. Then trying to get Thunderbird (TB) to take/see the new certs didn’t fare as well. Then I found that my CA expired in like August of 2004! Then after creating new ca and certs TB still didn’t see the new one. Aha! Forgot about the flip side of SMTP… IMAP. I thought I would cheat and just do a symlink to the existing postfix cert but that didn’t go well. Then I found the makeimapcert script and used that to renew one more year.

Trust me last year went much better but that was only because that was when I installed courier. So with this blog… maybe my documentation will help me get this figured out with less pain next year if I haven’t moved in to a new home by then.

Printing Now Fixed

As usual with most tech support I deal with they tend to have you rehash much of what you already have done; assuming you are technically savvy yourself. It infuriates me further to have to jump though their hoops to get any cooperation. The first reply this morning from IT is to “power down the printer and retry the same documents and report what the error logs say”. Well the only thing that proved was that this issue did not produce those error logs. Those errors were probably legit.

So on my own I attempt to print to file and use DOS to copy the file to the device. Here I get “The system cannot write to the specified device.” This sounds like a write permissions problem. Just before I even got the email off to report this to them, I got a message back stating they changed the spool settings and reboot our server.

You see, even in Windows I try my best to avoid rebooting servers. Perhaps they didn’t know you can restart individual services in Windows. Ah well, guess we’re good to go for another couple weeks before needing to reboot.