paul@tetrauk.UUCP (Paul Ashton) (10/12/90)
After a previous discussion and examining the man pages on TZ I noticed that the standard installation time zone initialisation script /etc/tz placed the line :- TZ=GMT0BST-1,M3.5,M10.5 into /etc/TIMEZONE. According to the manual -1 is the default and there should be a ";" seperator, so I changed the line to TZ=GMT0BST;M3.5,M10.5 which worked (just the same as the original) and also satisfied my minimalist philosophy :-) On rebooting some days later after a power failure, the machine refused to go to init level 2 complaining about getty's respawning too quickly, and then hung. A few reboots later and I noticed that sysinit processes in inittab aren't being spawned (such as bcheckrc), and also mapkey isn't executed, but all of the inittab stages can be executed manually and the system is then usable. ...4 hours later after comparing init, login, boot track 0, /boot, checking all permissions and /tcb stuff to the originals and then strings'ing init and examining all the files it accesses, I remember changing /etc/TIMEZONE!! I had commented out the original TZ and added the new one, so I flipped these over. Still fails. Finally, delete the commented line and it works. It turns out that if #TZ=anything is in /etc/TIMEZONE even though there are plenty of other #'d out lines, init is completely clobbered. Thought this might bite someone else out there some time... -- Paul