"Maria L. Wilson" <Maria.L.Wilson-1@nasa.gov> writes:
> yes they are all running the same postgres version. - 8.4.5
> just as a test this morning - on one of the problem machines, we
> installed another postgres installation - same version - just pointed it
> to different paths - copied over the conf files and brought the server
> up. This time it was the correct timeszone - US/Eastern. The other
> postgres is set to EST5EDT. When I try to set it to US/Eastern, I get
> an error...
> postgres=# set timezone = 'US/Eastern';
> ERROR: unrecognized time zone name: "US/Eastern"
Huh. That should most certainly work in a standard Postgres
installation. You're apparently missing that timezone file.
There are two possibilities:
1. If Postgres was built to use its own timezone database (the default),
then $INSTALLPREFIX/share/timezone/US/Eastern is missing. Which means
you've got an incomplete PG installation.
2. If Postgres was built with --with-system-tzdata=SOMETHING, then
SOMETHING/US/Eastern is missing, which means either an incomplete
system timezone database or whoever did the build used the wrong
value of SOMETHING for your platform.
I'd imagine that the EST5EDT setting you're seeing is some kind of
fallback behavior upon not finding the proper timezone file. It's
hard to be sure about where that came from without knowing exactly
what's missing.
regards, tom lane
