Time zone and BST woes in Europe/London

Question

I am really struggling with my hwclock since the UK changed to British Summer Time (BST) last weekend on my Centos 5.8 KVM guest.

Here's some command outputs..

    [root@host ~]# TZ=Europe/London date
    Mon Apr  2 08:12:03 EDT 2012
    [root@host ~]# TZ=Europe/Jersey date
    Mon Apr  2 08:12:11 EDT 2012
    [root@host ~]# TZ=Europe/Paris date 
    Mon Apr  2 14:12:16 CEST 2012
    [root@host ~]# TZ=Europe/Rome date 
    Mon Apr  2 14:12:22 CEST 2012
    [root@host ~]# TZ=Europe/Athens date
    Mon Apr  2 15:12:27 EEST 2012


    [root@host ~]# hwclock -rD
    hwclock from util-linux-2.13-pre7
    Using /dev/rtc interface to clock.
    Last drift adjustment done at 1333367010 seconds after 1969
    Last calibration done at 1333367010 seconds after 1969
    Hardware clock is on UTC time
    Assuming hardware clock is kept in UTC time.
    Waiting for clock tick...
    /dev/rtc does not have interrupt functions. Waiting in loop for time from /dev/rtc to change
    ...got clock tick
    Time read from Hardware Clock: 2012/04/02 12:22:27
    Hw clock time : 2012/04/02 12:22:27 = 1333369347 seconds since 1969
    Mon 02 Apr 2012 12:22:27 PM UTC  -0.422061 seconds

And finally when I ln -sf to Europe/London it just goes back to EDT :(

    [root@host ~]# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
    [root@host ~]# date
    Mon Apr  2 08:23:02 EDT 2012

:(

Here's also some contents of files:

 

    [root@host ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/clock
    ZONE="Europe/London"
    UTC=true
    ARC=false

Really struggling here guy and have googled til my eyes popped out but to no avail.

Answer 1

smybolically linking the files doesn't work - they need to be physically copied

[root@xxx]# mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.default
[root@xxx]# cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
[root@xxx]# date
Fri Apr 13 11:35:57 BST 2012

Hope that helps :-)

Answer 2

I had a similar problem on my mailserver runninng CentOS 6.4 64-bit. Mail coming in marked 6 hours forward in time! I set Oslo-time for the server. The clock was correct but it showed the wrong time zone. It should be CEST:

 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Oslo
 $date
 Thu Sep 19 17:08:42 EDT 2013

Cities in the same time zone showed CEST. Strange. The only way to fix it was to use Copenhagen instead.

localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Copenhagen
$ date
Thu Sep 19 17:16:55 CEST 2013

So if nothing works try to use a city in the same time zone.