time zone change

I got mail at work today informing me IT would be rebooting
my Windows
workstation to allow its timezone update to take effect. 
Apararently some
OSes tie that kind of information to the account.  Don't ask
me; I just
work there.  

Meanwhile, back at my apartment, it occurs to me that maybe
my zoneinfo
directory needs updating, courtesy of the US congress? 
What's the best
way to go about that?  

Also, I haven't found out when the zoneinfo database is
consulted.  Is it
read into memory at boot time, or are changes to the file
effective
immediately?  

Many humble thanks.  

--jkl

George Georgalis wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 10:41:15PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer
wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 11:39:48PM -0500, James K.
Lowden wrote:
> >> 
> >> Meanwhile, back at my apartment, it occurs to
me that maybe my
> >zoneinfo > directory needs updating, courtesy of
the US congress? 
> >What's the best > way to go about that?  
> >
> >I suspect the last snapshots from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily
> >for each active branch have up-to-date zoneinfo.
> 
> this came up on another list recently, someone reported
a bunch of
> release branches where correct. I think it was all of
them, but
> you can check if these dates are the same on your host
> 
>  zdump -v US/Eastern | grep '2007'
> US/Eastern  Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11
01:59:59 2007 EST
> isdst=0 US/Eastern  Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun
Mar 11 03:00:00
> 2007 EDT isdst=1 US/Eastern  Sun Nov  4 05:59:59 2007
UTC = Sun Nov  4
> 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 US/Eastern  Sun Nov  4
06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun
> Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0

Cool.  Thank you both.  I have 3.1 installed on one machine
and 2.0,
still, on my main workstation.  According to zdump, the 3.1
files are fine
(my output matches the above).  So I copied those files over
to the 2.0
machine and everything looks good.  

--jkl