openssh unix dev - Mar 2004 - 3.8p1 not honoring TZ environment variable

Hello,

I just built openssh 3.8p1 on an HP-UX 11i machine.  All looks well
except for the timezone.  I'm noticing now that when it logs stuff to
syslog, it's off by 2 hours for me.  What I've figured is this:

My timezone is MST7MDT (mountain time).
The timezone in /etc/default/tz is EST5EDT  (eastern time).

There's a 2 hour difference between  mountain & eastern time.

What I'm thinking is the real problem, is that it is not looking at the
TZ environment variable to get its own setting for the timezone when it
starts up, and so it just uses the default in /etc/default/tz.  This
behavior is definitely new to 3.8p1.  I was previously running 3.7.1p2,
which did not exhibit this behavior.  Of course, my workaround is to
change the value in /etc/default/tz, but it seems like it should be able
to get the right value out of the TZ environment variable.

If I'm not mistaken, sshd looks for the value of TZ with a getenv call
in session.c.  Not much magic there, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Thanks.

-Tom

Tom Orban wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just built openssh 3.8p1 on an HP-UX 11i machine.  All looks well
> except for the timezone.  I'm noticing now that when it logs stuff to
> syslog, it's off by 2 hours for me.  What I've figured is this:
> 
> My timezone is MST7MDT (mountain time).
> The timezone in /etc/default/tz is EST5EDT  (eastern time).
> 
> There's a 2 hour difference between  mountain & eastern time.
> 
> What I'm thinking is the real problem, is that it is not looking at the
> TZ environment variable to get its own setting for the timezone when it
> starts up, and so it just uses the default in /etc/default/tz.  This
> behavior is definitely new to 3.8p1.  I was previously running 3.7.1p2,
> which did not exhibit this behavior.  Of course, my workaround is to
> change the value in /etc/default/tz, but it seems like it should be able
> to get the right value out of the TZ environment variable.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, sshd looks for the value of TZ with a getenv call
> in session.c.  Not much magic there, but it doesn't seem to be working.
In 3.8p1 sshd clears its environment at startup.  You can disable this 
by deleting these lines from sshd.c:

         /* Clear environment */
         environ[0] = NULL;

That will probably be changed for the next release.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
     Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Tom Orban wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just built openssh 3.8p1 on an HP-UX 11i machine.  All looks well
> except for the timezone.  I'm noticing now that when it logs stuff to
> syslog, it's off by 2 hours for me.  What I've figured is this:
Known problem - I believe that Darren had already committed a fix. We 
should be making another portable release soon for this bug and a couple 
of others.

-d