Manually Updating Timezone information in ConsoleOne 1.3.6

  • 3639513
  • 03-Mar-2008
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell ConsoleOne 1.3.6.x

Situation

Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes in 2007 the United States, Canada, Western Australia and New Zealand, and in 2008 for the Australian states of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory.

ConsoleOne on each of the supported platforms includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
JRE versions, prior to 1.4.2_11, have outdated DST rules.

The JRE for ConsoleOne 1.3.6 through 1.3.6f use JRE versions that do not contain the DST updates.
All 1.3.6 versions of ConsoleOne prior to and including 1.3.6f will report incorrect time from March 11, 2007 through March 31, 2007 and from October 28, 2007 through November 3, 2007 for multiple time zones around the world. In New Zealand, ConsoleOne will report incorrect time from September 30, 2007 through October 7, 2007. In the Australian states of N.S.W., Victoria and S.A. and the A.C.T. ConsoleOne will report incorrect time from Sunday March 30, 2008 to Sunday April 6, 2008 (one week).

The JRE used by ConsoleOne needs to be updated to reflect the updated DST.

Resolution

Each instance of ConsoleOne needs to be updated system wide.

Sun has released information on updating JRE. The link to the article on Sun's website can be found at:
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 at:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp#timezone.
Use the latest version of the downloader, at the time of writing it is 1.3.3 .

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

If there are multiple instances of ConsoleOne in a given system, the following process is required for each instance.

1. Download the tool, extract it to a temporary location and copy it to the jre\bin directory of each instance of ConsoleOne 1.3.6x.
Some default directories include:
NetWare: sys:\public\mgmt\ConsoleOne\1.2\jre\bin
Windows: C:\Novell\ConsoleOne\1.2\jre\bin
OES Linux: /usr/ConsoleOne/jre/bin

Notes:
  • The java executable in the ConsoleOne jre\bin directory must be executed to correctly update the ConsoleOne JRE.
  • For updating the ConsoleOne located on NetWare servers the following steps must be executed from a Windows workstation with a drive mapped to the sys volume.
  • If you are using a map root command, map to the ConsoleOne jre directory or higher. A map root to the jre\bin directory will prevent the tzupdater utility from applying the timezone updates to the jre\lib directory.

2. Test the update process with the following command executed from the bin directory from step 1 above:

java -jar tzupdater.jar -t

For example:

NetWare:
With the "Z" drive mapped to the sys volume, from a command prompt at a workstation:
z:
cd z:\public\mgmt\ConsoleOne\1.2\jre\bin
java.exe -jar tzupdater.jar -t

Windows:
From a command prompt:
c:
cd c:\Novell\ConsoleOne\1.2\jre\bin
java.exe -jar tzupdater.jar -t

OES Linux:
From a terminal:
cd /usr/ConsoleOne/jre/bin
./java -jar tzupdater.jar -t

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 -f -bc -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. If no errors are reported and the command returns to a prompt without any messages then the update was successful.

Notes:
  • Executing the commands (steps 2 through 5) on the NetWare server console will result in the NetWare JRE being updated and not the ConsoleOne JRE. See TID 3980430 for details on updating the NetWare JRE.
  • Updating some early versions of ConsoleOne 1.3.6 occasionally resulted in errors that the tzupdater tool was not able to resolve. If you encounter this issue. Update the instance of ConsoleOne to the current version and reapply the DST update.
  • Limited testing with JRE version 1.4 and the current shipping version of ConsoleOne indicates that copying the jre/lib/zi directory from a updated version of ConsoleOne to a non updated version of ConsoleOne provides the updated timezone information to instances of ConsoleOne not updated using the tzupdater tool.

Status

Top Issue

Additional Information

- ConsoleOne versions prior to 1.3.6 use JRE 1.3x and can not be upgraded using the tzupdater.jar method noted above. If versions of ConsoleOne prior to 1.3.6 exist in your environment,Novell recommends that those instances be updated to the latest ConsoleOne 1.3.6.x version.

- The recommended update path is to update to a recent version (1.3.6f) of ConsoleOne, apply the time zone data updates using tzupdater.jar.

- There is a non supported, minimally tested, alternative option for older versions of ConsoleOne available using the tzupdater131.jar utility available from https://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=jXF9ydKm0ds~. The process to update Console1.3.5 and earlier versions running a JRE 1.3.1x is very similar to the steps above using this utility instead of tzupdater.jar

- For additional TIDs on the DST topic see TID 3094409 - (DST Master TID) Time zone and Daylight Saving Changes for Novell Products - 2006 and 2007
NOTE: All testing was done with the latest ConsoleOne Snapins.