TangleBones

The other day I noticed that the time was a little off on my Mac mini, so I went to the Date & Time settings and noticed, the “Set date & time automatically:” option. I selected it, chose the “Apple Americas” NTP server, and it immediately corrected the time.

That’s good.

But that’s when things went downhill. I closed the Date & Time settings, looked up in the top right corner of the screen and noticed that the time was off by 5 hours. Being a guy who knows a thing or two about time zones, I realized that it was showing me Greenwich Mean Time.

Back into Date & Time, and into the Time Zone tab, where it was indeed set to GMT. I clicked our location on the map to select EST, used the drop-down to pick “Washington, D.C. – U.S.A.” and noticed that the time in the upper right didn’t change. So I closed Date & Time window thinking that it must be one of those modal/non-modal window issues, and saw that the time wasn’t changing.

What’s wierd is that when I set the time zone and go back to the Date & Time tab, it shows the correct time. But opening and closing it causes it to forget the time zone.

After turning on and off the automatic time setting, setting the time zone on the map, clicking the lock on and off a million times, I realized that this wasn’t going to work. The Time Zone info always went back to GMT when I closed System Preferences. So I did what any Unix geek would do: I opened a terminal window.

  ~ jemaleddin$ date
  Sat Dec 24 08:41:29 EST 2005

Hmmm – EST? That looks fine…

  ~ jemaleddin$ ls -al /etc/localtime

  ls: /etc/localtime: Permission denied
  lrwxr-x---   1 root  wheel  30 Dec 24 08:37 /etc/localtime   

Duh…

  ~ jemaleddin$ sudo ls -al /etc/localtime
  Password:
  lrwxr-x---   1 root  wheel  30 Dec 24 08:37 /etc/localtime ->
  /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern

So date knows the right time zone, the system is pointing to the right time zone, and yet the System Preferences are incapable of figuring that out.

Does anybody know what that means? Has anybody else had this problem? It’s been going on for a couple days and it’s starting to get annoying: iCal says that I have to start making Christmas Eve dinner at 5:45 PM, and I think the kids will be asleep before the ham gets done if I do that. Any ideas?

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