Should /etc/localtime (under RHEL 5.3, not that I think it matters) be:
- a symlink to
/usr/share/zoneinfo/whatever - a hard link to
/usr/share/zoneinfo/whatever - a copy of
/usr/share/zoneinfo/whatever
I'd prefer 1) because it's explicit and easy to manage via Puppet but will it break anything? RedHat's default looks to be 3). Edit: I'm aware of the usual problems of symlinking across filesystems, tzdata updates, etc, but wasn't aware of the historical no-/usr-during-rc.sysinit gotcha. Thanks, all!
Best Answer
3 is the prefered method. This is due to an old bug that cause systems with a seperate /usr partition to set the system time to UTC since /usr/share/zoneinfo was not available during rc.sysinit. You can look it up at the following bugzilla