perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Dale W. Carder" <>]

Thus spake Roderick Mooi 
()
 on Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 09:40:39AM +0200:
> 
> 2 were upgraded, the working one has the time zone as
> "Africa/Johannesburg", the one with the error has "Etc/GMT+2". I spoke
> to my colleague who upgraded (the 3.2. to 3.3. upgrade that is) and this
> was human error on installation - although Johannesburg is GMT+2 some
> Googling revealed that GMT+2 in the timezone files actually means minus
> 2 (the signs are inverted) -joy ;)

Correct.  From IANA's documentation I found in tzdata2013i:

"POSIX has positive signs west of Greenwich, but many people expect
 positive signs east of Greenwich.  For example, TZ='Etc/GMT+4' uses
 the abbreviation "GMT+4" and corresponds to 4 hours behind UT
 (i.e. west of Greenwich) even though many people would expect it to
 mean 4 hours ahead of UT (i.e. east of Greenwich)."


> So, I'm not sure if psTracerouteViewer should be able to handle GMT+-x
> configs - that will determine if an issue is required... 

Well, it looks like we can't, at least not easily.  We're using the
DateTime::TimeZone perl module.  While Etc/GMT is defined in the module, 
no other entries in the IANA/Olson database for Etc (as seen in
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc) seem to appear for offsets from GMT.

http://search.cpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone/lib/DateTime/TimeZone/Catalog.pm#Linked_Zones

Dale