Timezone here ast -4 -what timezone to set then

The timezone is determined by reading the 'TZ' environment variable.

This variable is set when you execute 'set_parms timezone'. Set_parms
edits the file '/etc/TIMEZONE,' which exports the 'TZ' environment
variable. When you reboot after executing set_parms, the file
/etc/TIMEZONE will be read and your TZ variable set to the value you
specified. The value is in the format:

  [:]STDoffset[DST[offset][,rule]]

For example: PST8PDT for the U.S. Pacific Time Zone

See the environ(5) manpage for a detailed description of the format.

Note, the offset for daylight savings time is supplied by the
'/usr/lib/tztab' configuration file.

libc functions like ctime use the 'TZ' variable to determine the timezone

Hi.  My timezone is AST- 4.  What timezone to set  in order to get AST- 4.

We use timezone America/Puerto_Rico wchis is ast -4

Waiting for someone who can help me

Use TZ=AST4

That is set like this.  but the thing is that when I put export TZ=America/Puerto_rico it gave me the date as 4 hours later.

America/Puerto_Rico is needed in the Oracle Monitoring agent that will monitor the database and the server.

Other solaris servers have set America/Puerto_rico and the agent as America/Puerto_Rico and the hours still the same.

something is wrong here .

Test like this:
1. login
2. export TZ=AST
3. date
To remove just do export TZ=

It is 2:40 pm (14:40 in military hour) and the test gave this:

[oracle@hpdbdev1 /home/oracle]$ export TZ=AST
[oracle@hpdbdev1 /home/oracle]$ date
Fri Mar 18 18:40:24 AST 2011
[oracle@hpdbdev1 /home/oracle]$

If you prefer to see AST as the timezone versus GMT-4.
if your timezone info is in /usr/share/zoneinfo
cd /usr/share/zoneinfo
Set your zone to TZ="America/Puerto_Rico"
if you have /etc/localtime
ln /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Puerto_Rico /etc/localtime
Will do what you need/want.

sh: /usr/share/zoneinfo:  not found.

ls -l /usr/share/zoneinfo
This is a data repository and not a command to be executed.

[oracle@hpdbdev1 /u01/app/oracle/product/agent11g/bin]$ ls -l /usr/share/zoneinf
o
/usr/share/zoneinfo not found

Can you check if your NTP is synching right?

ntpq -p

Should give you an idea where you are, if any NTP clock was configured.