oracle 19c rac cluster nodes show in different time zones

Question

working on an oracle 19c 2-node rac cluster. we were running awr reports when we noted in sys.dba_hist_snapshot that the cluster nodes were in different time zones. We have validated that our s_crsconfig files on each server both show America/Los_Angeles as the time zone. timedatectl also shows that the nodes are both in the same time zone (America/Los_Angeles / PST8PDT).

(1) How can I tell which time zone each node thinks it is in? (2) How can I resolve this so that both nodes agree on the time zone?

Thank you.

Answer 1

1. Check the actual value of TZ variable of database processes on both nodes, example:

$ ps -ef | grep [o]ra_smon
oracle   1296361       1  0 20:46 ?        00:00:00 ora_smon_KIRA1
$ sudo strings /proc/1296361/environ | grep TZ
TZ=Europe/Budapest
$

2. Make sure it has the same value on both nodes. s_crsconfig was a good start, but TZ can be defined at DB resource level with srvctl setenv (check with srvctl getenv database -db DB_UNIQUE_NAME) or other custom locations if the instances were started with sqlplus instead of srvctl. If you can not find where it was set, you may try setting TZ with srvctl setenv which should take care of this on the next instance restart with srvctl, but normally this is unnecessary.