lamp appliance, postfix, timestamps in log

Thank you again for helping.

It looks like the postfix startup in /etc/init.d goes out of its way to turn off the TZ variable. I edited the main.cf file, but then had trouble starting postfix. Since I'm afraid of doing more harm than good, I'll let this sleeping dog lie. The only problem is the date stamp in the log, and I'm the only one who has noticed.

Thanks again!

Dan

TurnKey Linux wrote:

I have experienced appliances out of sync but setting the correct timezone has resolved it. ButI have never done much with postfix so I don't know where to from here. Only other thing I can think of is to set a local ntp time server. I did that before but it was a Win guest in my PVE setup setup so doubt it is directly relevant anyway.

Hello Jeremy,

And thank you for your reply.  I followed the instructions you shared for

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

This confirmed that my timezone is "America" "New York" and it touched
/etc/localtime.

Then I ran
postfix reload
which logged the following to /var/log/mail.info:

May 18 12:36:15 lamp postfix/postfix-script[6474]: refreshing the Postfix mail system
May 18 12:36:15 lamp postfix/master[1538]: reload -- version 2.7.0, configuration ...

But the logged time is 4 hours ahead of the current time:
root@lamp /var/log# date
Fri May 18 08:36:25 EDT 2012

I ran "postfix reload" again, but it still logs the incorrect time (4 hours ahead).

The problem seems to be with postfix, not Ubuntu.

I had copied /etc/localtime to   /var/spool/postfix/etc/localtime

This apparently fixed the problem for others who have experienced it.

I found this link to /etc/localtime:

root@lamp /var/log# find / -name localtime -exec ls -lut {} \;
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3519 May 18 08:33 /etc/localtime
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3519 May 17 12:06 /var/spool/postfix/etc/localtime
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 May 17 12:06 /var/spool/postfix/usr/lib/zoneinfo/localtime -> /etc/localtime
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 May 17 12:07 /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime -> /etc/localtime

I broke the link, then copied /etc/localtime to

/var/spool/postfix/usr/lib/zoneinfo/

but still no luck.

Might there be some other directory where the "localtime" file should be copied to make postfix happy?

Regards,
Dan
 

Have a look at this blog post for setting the timezone:

/blog/configuring-timezone

As for a client I'd check the Ubuntu server guide and/or forums for info