[sdnog] Impact of new timezone in Sudan

[Philip Paeps]

On 2017-10-28 18:50:31 (+0200), Philip Paeps wrote:

> On 2017-10-24 22:15:56 (+0200), Manhal Mohammed wrote:
>> We all know that Sudan will change its timezone from GMT+3  to GMT+2  
>> after few days  "1st of November "
>> so I'm curious about the effect of this change on services,  
>> transactions,  SSLs  licences, DB. .. etc?
>> specially the services with timestamps :/
>> Also what will be the impact of this change on  ISPs ?
>
> As Patrick pointed out: if you're running your servers and 
> infrastructure on UTC (which you really, really, really should be 
> doing), you should not have any serious problems.  Time will continue 
> to move monotonically forward.  Anything that converts your UTC 
> timestamps to local time will need to be aware of the new timezone 
> though.
>
> You should make sure that anything which cares about timezones has the 
> updated timezone data (2017c of tzinfo) installed:
>
> https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2017-October/000047.html
>
> This hasn't landed in FreeBSD yet, but it will soon (people have been 
> prodded and worst case I can do it).  Other operating systems will 
> probably update soon too.

I've updated FreeBSD-CURRENT tonight and I'll merge the update back to 
supported stable branches on Monday.  I'll try to get patches into 
supported releases ASAP too, but it might be too late to get binary 
updates on time.

If you're really worried, you can patch your system (fairly) trivially 
by hand.  E.g. for a system running FreeBSD 11.1:

     % svnlite co https://svn.freebsd.org/base/releng/11.1/ src
     % svnlite merge -c r325059 ^/head/ src
     % cd src/share/zoneinfo
     % make obj && make depend && make
     % su
     [root password]
     # make install

If you're running another release, change the `releng/11.1` 
appropriately.

You can check that your system is up to date by comparing the 
Africa/Juba and Africa/Khartoum timezones.  On an outdated system they 
will be the same, on a patched system they'll be different:

     % cd /usr/share/zoneinfo
     % diff -u Africa/Juba Africa/Khartoum
     Files Africa/Juba and Africa/Khartoum differ

Again though: unless you have systems that care about the correct local 
time, you should not really have a problem.

Let me know if you need help updating FreeBSD systems.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information
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