Daylight Saving Time and Sun's JRE

Technical Note 2220

Last Reviewed 22-Mar-2007
Applies to:
Mobility XE Server and Mobility Warehouse
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Summary

Important: This is a cosmetic issue only. It does not affect the performance of either the Mobility Server or the Mobility Warehouse.

The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. by approximately four weeks. As a result, beginning in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier on March 11, 2007, and end one week later on November 4, 2007, resulting in a new DST period that is four weeks longer than previously observed. These dates are different from previous DST start and stop dates.

Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE) stores rules about DST observance. Older JREs have outdated rules that will be superseded by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As a result, applications running on an older JRE may report incorrect time from March 11, 2007 through April 2, 2007 and from October 29, 2007 through November 4, 2007.

Mobility XE employs the JRE in both the Mobility Server Console and the Mobility Warehouse. The JRE versions that currently ship with the Server and the Warehouse are older and may contain these outdated rules. This Tech Note includes a link to Sun's TZupdater tool that corrects the rules. For complete information about Sun's JRE and DST, refer to U.S. Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007 on Sun's website.

Determining if you need the TZupdater tool

According to Sun, this issue primarily affects JREs located in the Eastern, Mountain, and Hawaiian timezones. You can determine if your JREs are affected by following these steps:

Verifying the time in the Mobility Console Event Log

1. Open the Mobility Console: on the Start menu, click Programs, NetMotion, Mobility Console.

2. On the Server Status page, click the Events link.

3. Note the times of events in the Event Log. Compare them with the times of the same events in the NetMotion Event Viewer (on the Start menu, click Programs, NetMotion, Event Viewer). If the Event Log time is one hour off from the Event Viewer time, you can use the TZupdater tool to correct it.

Verifying the time in the Mobility Warehouse

1. Open the Sun ONE Directory Server console: on the Start menu, click Programs, Sun ONE Server Products (or Sun Java™ System Server Products), Sun ONE Server Console 5.2 (or Sun Java™ System Server Console 5.2), and log on with the user ID and password you created during warehouse setup.

2. On the Servers and Applications tab, expand the tree until you see your Directory Server listing. Select your server, and then click Open.

3. On the Status tab, note the Current time on server: value. If it is one hour off from the system clock on the machine, you can use the TZupdater tool to correct it.

Running the TZupdater tool

Click here to download a zipped version of the TZupdater tool. You may want to run the tool twice: once to update the JRE in the Mobility XE Server, and once to update the JRE in the Mobility Warehouse (the Sun ONE Directory Server console).

Complete instructions for running the TZupdater tool can be found in this ReadMe on Sun's website. Below is a modified set of instructions for running the tool on the Mobility XE Server and Mobility Warehouse.

Updating the JRE in the Mobility XE Server

Note: After running the tool, the Mobility Console (not the Mobility XE Server) must be stopped and restarted for the change to take effect.

1. Verify the Mobility Console is not open on the machine hosting your NetMotion Server.

2. Unzip the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.zip file. The contents will extract into a folder named tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.

3. Copy the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.jar file from the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c folder to your NetMotion Server's \webui\jre\bin directory (the default location is C:\Program Files\NetMotion Server\webui\jre\bin).

4. Open a command prompt and change directory to the location of the NetMotion Server's \webui\jre\bin directory (the default location is C:\Program Files\NetMotion Server\webui\jre\bin).

5. Enter this command (note it is case-sensitive, type it exactly as written below):

   java.exe -jar tzupdater.jar -u

6. After the command has executed, open the Startup Settings utility (on the Start menu, click Programs, NetMotion, Startup Settings).

7. On the Mobility Console page, click the Stop button. After the button has changed to Start, wait a moment and then click it again to restart the console.

8. After the console has restarted (it may take several seconds to start up), open the Mobility Console and click on the Events link. Events in the log should now display with the same times as the same events in the Mobility Event Viewer.

Updating the JRE in the Mobility Warehouse

1. Verify the Sun ONE Directory Server console is not open on the machine hosting your Mobility Warehouse.

2. Unzip the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.zip file. The contents will extract into a folder named tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.

3. Copy the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c.jar file from the tzupdater-1.1.0-2007c folder to the Sun\MPS\bin\base\jre\bin directory (the default location is C:\Program Files\Sun\MPS\bin\base\jre\bin).

4. Open a command prompt and change directory to Sun\MPS\bin\base\jre\bin (the default location is C:\Program Files\Sun\MPS\bin\base\jre\bin).

5. Enter this command (note it is case-sensitive, type it exactly as written below):

   java.exe -jar tzupdater.jar -u

6. After the command has executed, open the Sun ONE Directory Server console and log on with the user ID and password you created during warehouse setup.

7. On the Servers and Applications tab, expand the tree until you see your Directory Server listing. Select your server, and then click Open.

8. On the Status tab, verify the Current time on server: value matches the system clock on the machine.

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