Manually Updating Timezone information in DNS-DHCP Management Console

  • 3621952
  • 12-Feb-2007
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell DNS-DHCP Management Console
Novell DHCP Management Console
Novell DNS Management Console

Situation

Daylight Saving Time in the US and Canada is changing.
Western Australia Daylight Saving Time change

The DNS-DHCP Management Console includes a separate instance of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) that is older than version 1.4.2_11.
The JRE stores rules about DST observance all around the globe. Older JREs (prior to 1.4.2_11) will have outdated rules that will be superseded by the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the various updates in Canada and Australia.

Resolution

The following process may be used to manually update the DNS-DHCP Management Console Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This has only been tested on the version of the DNS-DHCP Management Console included with NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 5 or later. This process only works on JRE versions of 1.4x..

Sun has released information on what needs to be updated to avoid this problem. The link to the article on Sun's website can be found by going to: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/

For JRE versions 1.4 or later, Sun has made available a tool that will modify the time zone data within the existing JRE. The name of the tool is "tzupdater" and can be found by going to http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.

NOTE: You will be required to setup a free user account with Sun to download the tool.

If there are multiple instances of the DNS-DHCP Management Console on a given system, the following process is required for each instance.

1. Once the tool is downloaded extract it and copy it to the jre\bin directory of each instance of the DNS-DHCP Management Console. Default locations on Windows workstations include:

C:\Novell\DNSDHCP\jre\bin
C:\Program Files\Novell\DNSDHCP\jre\bin

2. Test the update process with the following command executed in the same directory as step 1 above:

java -jar tzupdater.jar -t -v

This step will execute a test only and report on the status of an update attempt. It will likely report a large number of errors with time zones missing. This is expected with an out of date JRE. If there are no errors your JRE is up to date already. You can also execute the above command with the "-v" verbose switch for additional information.

3. Update the JRE with the current time zone information by executing the following:

java -jar tzupdater.jar -u -v

This will update the timezone information and provide a verbose output.

4. After the tool has completed processing a successful update will be indicated by the two lines:

Validating the new time zone data... done.
Time zone data update is complete.

5. Repeating step 2 above can also be used to confirm that there are no errors and all updates are completed.

Note:
- Limited testing has been done on this method of updating the DNS-DHCP Management Console.

Additional Information