Timezone Setting Won't Stick

December 17, 2008

Yesterday I ran into a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard computer that would not keep its timezone setting. The usual zap-pram trick didn't help, and a repair permissions didn't help. However, during the repair permissions I noticed an entry for a file/folder named localtime. I don't have the exact entry, but it looked something like this:

permissions on /etc/localtime drwxr-xr-x should be lrwxr-xr-x

The initial d vs. l jumped out at me. After the repair, when the setting still didn't stick, I went into the terminal to have a look. I found a directory in etc named localtime and it had a file named Eastern in it -- not knowing how the data should actually be stored, this seemed reasonable to me. I deleted the file named Eastern, but that didn't fix it. Then I deleted the entire localtime directory. That worked.

I assume that some time in the past Apple stored the timezone in a file in this directory, and whenever this system was updated, the updater failed to remove the directory.

The moral of the story: pay attention to the items that Repair Permissions throws at you.