Re: Determining/Setting a server's time zone

Tom Lane wrote:
> Madison Kelly <linux(at)alteeve(dot)com> writes:
>> How/Where does PostgreSQL set or determine the local time zone?
>
> Well, "show timezone" will tell you what PG is using. Where it came
> from is a bit harder to answer. The default is to use whatever
> zone is current according to the postmaster's startup environment,
> and that would depend on some factors you didn't tell us, like
> how you're starting the postmaster. Do your two machines report
> the same timezone when you run "date" as a shell command?
>
> The easy solution is to set the value you want in postgresql.conf.
>
> regards, tom lane

Hi Tom,

'date' shows the same:

Server (PostgreSQL 8.1):

$ date
Mon Mar 23 20:07:20 EDT 2009
db=> show timezone;
TimeZone
----------
GMT
(1 row)

Workstation (PostgreSQL 8.3):

$ date
Mon Mar 23 20:07:09 EDT 2009
db=> show timezone;
TimeZone
-----------
localtime
(1 row)

Neither has the environment variable 'TZ' set (at least, 'echo $TZ'
returns nothing). Also, 'cat /etc/postgresql/8.1/main/environment' has
no values on either machine. In both cases, the postmaster is started by
init.d. The only reference to time zone I could otherwise find was in
the 'postgresql.conf' file. Both are commented out with the comment that
timezone defaults to TZ.

My concern with forcing a value in the postgresql.conf file is
forgetting to update the conf file when EDT/EST changes...

Thanks for the help so far!

Madi