My G5 tower gets its date & time from Apple via the Internet

[leftofthedial]

It has been an hour early since Sunday. Anyone else having this problem or know what's going on?

[Stinky The Clown]

1. Check the time zone setting

My PCs have a propensity to self adjust their time zone every once in a while. I suppose it is also possible on a Mac.

[leftofthedial]

3. It's set for the correct time zone.

I do have the daylight savings option selected. I thought perhaps Apple screwed up and changed for daylight savings a week early.

[moggie]

4. Do you keep the system updated?

I'm not in the US, so I'm vague on your daylight saving rules, but didn't daylight saving get extended recently, with the end being pushed back a week? OS vendors had to issue software updates to cope with that.

[leftofthedial]

6. oddly enough, that seems to be it.

I can't update my system due to a software compatibility issue. I updated it about a year ago and I was shot out of the water until I could completely rebuild my system. Thanks!

[moggie]

8. You can fix this without a full update

There are two ways: easy, and interesting.

First, you need to find out what file your Mac is using for its timezone information. Fire up Terminal, and do:

ls -l /etc/localtime

For me, this says:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 33 14 Jun 21:47 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London

so in my case the file is /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London. In your case, it'll be something else: maybe /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver.

1. The easy way: find someone who keeps their Mac up to date, and get them to send you that file. Then copy it into place. Assuming the new file is on your desktop, do something like this:

cd /usr/share/zoneinfo/America
chmod 644 ~/Desktop/Denver
sudo mv Denver Denver.bak
sudo mv ~/Desktop/Denver .

(sudo will prompt for your password the first time).

2. The interesting way: get a copy of the public-domain files describing the world's timezones, and use a utility included with Mac OS to compile a new timezone file from this. Fetch this file:

ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2008i.tar.gz

(the name is correct, but will change if it's subsequently updated).

Assuming it's in your Downloads folder:

cd ~/Downloads
mkdir tz
cd tz
tar zxf ../tzdata2008i.tar.gz
sudo zic -d output -g wheel -m 644 northamerica
sudo mv /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver.bak
sudo mv output/America/Denver /usr/share/zoneinfo/America

You can then exit from Terminal and trash the Downloads/tz folder.

What makes this method interesting is that the files from that tzdata2008i tarball are full of interesting historical and geographic information. They're plain text files, so take a look. For example, did you know that daylight saving time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin? Or that there were two consecutive Fridays in Alaska in 1867?

[Adelante]

2. I am, but I thought it was because I'm in Mexico

There is a week's difference in the time change between the two countries. I have no other explanation, but I don't ever remember it happening in years past, either. Knowing it's happening to others now has me wondering again.

[Spritz57]

5. The US has delayed the time change for one week.

This weekend, November 2, we will fall back an hour.

[leftofthedial]

7. I knew it was next week, but I'd forgotten that it was pushed back a week

That's it! Thanks.