I was speaking about a server that hosts my perl application, and crontab entries.

I setup a sandbox solaris 8 machine and I ran a number of tests by manually changing the time. I have discovered the following:

* If the `date` command is used by root to change the time, the next crontab entry is not executed properly (or at all it seems) even if the clock runs through the proper time.

* Solaris 8 changes to the DST (PDT) using a time zone conversion at 2am (at least by my american, PST localization settings). This causes cronjobs scheduled to run between 2am and 3am in spring time conversion window to not execute.

* None of this is documented in man cron or man crontab.

* Google has a few discussions on this for various flavors of unix. Lots of speculation, not a lot of facts though.

Thanks for the input!