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Update the Timezone data on your old Linux system

I was confronted with the problem of updating over 1200 Linux (SuSE 9.2) boxes all across the country this week with less than 1 month to get it done!  All these boxes cannot afford to be down for very long. 

The traditionnal answer I was given by my vendors was upgrade to the next version (SuSE 9.3) which has the new timezone data.  But as you may know in a mission critical environment this is not possible as all kinds of bugs could creep up from the new and old software clashing and there you go, on the street looking for work

So the solution that I came up with was to simply replace all the timezone files affected (’/usr/shared/zoneinfo/US/*’ + ‘/usr/shared/zoneinfo/America/*’). If you replace all those files the OS will recognize the new timezone data…

You can check if you have the right timezone data by running: “zdump -v US/Eastern | grep 2007” from the command line.  Replace the ‘US/eastern’ with your timezone info. If the dates are 11 Mar and 4 Nov then you are ok but if your see 1 Apr and 28 Oct, then you have the worng info. I am attaching a tar.gz file here that contains a patch to fix your system.  just untar/gz it in a temporary directory and run “installPatch.sh” Hope this helps!