[TriLUG] Questions about time settings

[Tom Bryan]

When I installed Red Hat Linux, I think that I set the hardware clock to GMT. 
 The timezone is set to GMT-5.  (I don't set the local timezone to Eastern 
because one of the applications that my company develops doesn't like the 
machine on which it runs to adjust for daylight savings time.)

Now, I'm in the KDE desktop, and my clock correctly displays 9:00, which is 
8:00 on my wall clock.  That should be 14:00 GMT.  

As I'd expect, I'm seeing 
Dec 25 09:04:10
in /var/log/messages and in other logs, such as Apache's access logs.

In playing with Zope this morning, I noticed some odd behavior.  The Zope 
object database is timestamping objects with creation times such as 
2001-12-24 11:06:04 PM, which is 10 hours before local standard time, and 15 
hours before my hardware clock (I think).  

Possibly related, (I'm not great with time formats, but it looks odd) mail I 
send from KMail to myself has this sort of header

Received: from there by mail4.nc.rr.com  with Microsoft SMTPSVC;
         Tue, 25 Dec 2001 08:00:10 -0500
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
From: Tom Bryan <tbryan at python.net>
To: tbryan at python.net
Subject: Time test.
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 09:09:32 +0500

Okay, so 8:00 -0500 is Eastern daylight savings local time, which is GMT -5 
hours (or should it be GMT -6 hours?).  Compare that to my (slightly fast) 
clock which doesn't adjust for DST.  09:09.  That looks okay, but 
09:09:32 +0500
         ^^^^^
Is that what it's supposed to be?  I ask because I have sent e-mail from here 
to my work address, and I have noticed that those times are always way off 
according to the e-mail system at work.  When I click on "Adjust Date & Time" 
on the KDE panel, it runs /usr/bin/kcmshell, and that doesn't even list the 
GMT-5 "timezone."  

I have never really worried about time settings, and I always leave it to the 
real sys admins at work.  Therefore, I don't even know where to start 
troubleshooting this problem.  Any ideas?

# hwclock --show
Tue 25 Dec 2001 09:25:48 AM GMT-5  0.707081 seconds

---Tom