EMES Consulting, LLC
Friday, May 09 2008
Daylight Savings Time Updates
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that the United States and Canada change the start and end dates of daylight saving time starting in 2007. Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October. This will make electronic clocks that had pre-programmed dates for adjusting to daylight saving time obsolete and will require updates to computer operating systems.
For NetWare Servers (all versions), save the following two files to a directory on the server, then from the console type 'load {path}dstshift.nlm'
dstcfg.txt dstshift.nlm
Before you run dstshift, type 'time' at the console to see the current settings for start and end of daylight savings time. After you run dstshift, type 'time' again to see the updates. Also look for the log file dstlog.txt that is created in the directory where you put dstshift.nlm.
Additionally, for NetWare servers, and (in most cases) workstations with the Sun JRE installed, you'llneed to update the time zone definitions in java. Check your version of jvm: on the NetWare server console prompt, type 'm jvm.nlm'. For version 1.4.x, use tzupdater.jar, for 1.3.x use tzupdater131.jar:
tzupdater.jar
tzupdater131.jar
Right click on the link and save the .jar file to a directory on the server, e.g., sys:\dst. Then from the server console, type 'java -jar sys:\dst\tzupdater.jar -u -v'. Then look on the logger screen for the results, you should see 'Time zone data update is complete.'
You can use these same jar files and the same java command to update a jvm on a windows workstation of the same version (1.3, 1.4).
Novell GroupWise may also need updates which vary depending on your version. See the link to Novell below for additional information.
For Microsoft servers and workstations, in most cases windows update will have taken care of the needed changes, if you have a current version of the software, current patches, etc. For any version of Windows, you can also use the TZEDIT tool and manually edit the affected time zones. For Windows 2000, you can use the script located here. (take all three files, use at your own risk; backup your registry first!). Also see the links below for Microsoft's page on DST updates.
Additional Resources:
Novell:http://www.novell.com/info/daylight_saving.html
Symantec:http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-gate.nsf/0/18626d09a6291c95ca25726d0051ea4f?OpenDocument
Cisco:http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk648/tk362/technologies_tech_note09186a00807ca437.shtml
Hewlett-Packardhttp://h10072.www1.hp.com/dst/index.htm
IBM:http://www.ibm.com/support/alerts/us/en/daylightsavingstimealert.html
BlackBerry:http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/index.shtml
Sun:http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/
Apple:http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305056
Palm:http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst.html
Dell: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?docid=29DBF04A96A300D9E040A68F5B2851A3&c=us&l=en&s=gen
Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues
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