Sentinel: Timezone change in United States & Canada 2007

  • 3224978
  • 09-Mar-2007
  • 29-Apr-2013

Environment

Sentinel All Versions
Sentinel 5.1.x
Sentinel 6
All Platforms
Crystal Reports

Situation

Please note if this TID was used before March 9th, 2007 there is change as to how the tzupdater.jar should be used and will need to be reapplied if tzupdater.jar was not applied with the -f -dc parameters.
Please see KB 3008665 for more information.
Daylight Saving Time in the US and Canada is changing.
Western Australia DST is changing.
Starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time will be extended by 4 weeks in most U.S. and Canadian time zones. Daylight Saving Time will begin the second Sunday in March (3 weeks earlier) and will end the first Sunday in November (1 week later). This change complies with a provision of the Energy Preservation Act of 2005 and affects all U.S. time zones that observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). Many Canadian provinces that share or border these time zones have also announced plans to adopt this change.
Are any modifications needed for the Sentinel product to accommodate the 2007 Daylight Saving Time change in the United States and Canada?

Resolution

There are several places in which updates may be necessary to account for the 2007 Daylight Saving Time change:
· Any machine running Sentinel components (5.1.3 SP1 and below)
· Any device or operating system sending events to a Sentinel system
· Crystal Enterprise report server
Please see below for additional details.
All Versions Previous to Sentinel 6 will need to have the JVM updated to accommodate the 2007 Daylight Saving Time change.
Windows:
Windows requires the following patches be applied to recognize the change in DST:
Apply the Windows timezone patch as specified in the above Microsoft URL.
Stop all Sentinel Services on the machine.
Apply the following JVM patch:
Then unzip the tzupdater into a location that is easily accessed from the command line.
Run the following command as Administrator from the location where tzupdater was extracted:
"%ESEC_JAVA_HOME%\java" -jar tzupdater.jar -f -bc
Once this is done, restart your Sentinel processes.
Solaris/Linux
Solaris requires the following patches be applied to recognize the change in DST:
The patch listed above is the timezone specific patch for the Solaris 5.9 OS. For an OS other than 5.9 search the Sun downloads site for the patch set specific for the operating system.
To patch the Solaris OS use the following command:
patchadd
Stop all Sentinel Services on the machine.
Apply the following JVM patch:
Run the following command as esecadm from the location where tzupdater was extracted:
$ESEC_JAVA_HOME/java -jar tzupdater.jar -f -bc
Once this is done, restart your Sentinel processes.
Sentinel 6 (currently in development) already has the updated JVM version, but may require OS specific patches to accommodate the 2007 Daylight Saving Time change.
For Crystal Reports, please visit http://support.businessobjects.com/downloads/daylight_savings.aspfor more information.
There are limited patches available from Business Objects but they do provide a list of available patches as well as a list of all the versions that will require a patch. Please note that as of January 22, 2007 there was no patch available for Crystal Reports XI. There is however a patch available for Crystal Reports XI R2. We have contacted Business Objects and we are awaiting an ETA on the other patches listed on their site.
Also note, there are "EventTime" and "DateTime" values used within Sentinel that rely on other sources for time.
The "EventTime" value of an Event is generated from the Devices/Applications that created the event thus there may be action required from the Devices or Applications (i.e. an event with a time stamp will be created by any device or application, such as: Windows machines, Solaris Servers, Cisco Routers, Firewall applications, etc...) Please contact the vendors of these applications or devices to determine whether an update is required to accommodate the new time change.
"DateTime" value is generated from the OS that Collector Manager is running on. Action may be required by the OS, please check with the OS Vendor, (i.e Windows, Solaris. Linux).
Note: Internally Sentinel uses UTC to keep track of time. UTC is not sensitive to timezones or DST. Therefore, if one Sentinel process is in the US and another is in India, even if the India system did not have the above patches applied Sentinel should still work. The DST change problem is related to converting to/from UTC to other formats (e.g. - local time, or human friendly time).