How to change the timezone for a SmartOS Global Zone

smartostimezone

The SmartOS Global Zone defaults to the UTC timezone. I'd like to schedule some cron jobs, and I'd like them to automatically follow daylight saving time changes, without requiring me to manually change the UTC offset every time the daylight saving change occurs.

How can I change the timezone for my SmartOS Global Zone?

Best Answer

There are two methods to do this. The first is to write a custom SMF manifest and place it in /opt/custom/smf - any manifests in this directory are imported automatically at boot.

The other method is to use pkgin to install the smtools package. This provides a script called sm-set-timezone.

See this blog entry by Jonathan Perkin, who works for Joyent for reference.

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Freebsd – How to discover current time-zone (FreeNAS shell)

$ date "+%Z"

Will give you the current timezone

$ date "+%z"

Will give the offset from DST

Linux – A cron replacement that handles multiple time zones

I think you're trying to have it both ways and the reality is that you just can't. If you want a job to run at 8 AM local time, for example, regardless of whether daylight saving is active then you either run your system (and cron) in local time and don't do seasonal edits or you run it in UTC (not GMT) and do seasonal edits. If you want your jobs to run at the same UTC, regardless, then you run cron according to UTC and there's nothing more to do.

If what you want is for a user to be able to schedule a cron job according to his local time zone and not have him have to think about conversions for his convenience then you write a conversion script that accepts a cron spec and a time zone then does the conversion to UTC behind the scenes and edits the crontab for him. It could even be a two-way conversion to handle changes to existing entries.

It will be helpful if you tell us what you're actually trying to accomplish.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Freebsd – How to discover current time-zone (FreeNAS shell)

Linux – A cron replacement that handles multiple time zones

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