SUMMARY: Updated: patch for US daylight savings time changes on Solaris2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7

I've had a number of people contact me about this summary. I would like
to add some add'l details to the summary.

1. Details on timezone tables: 
"In the tz database's FTP distribution the code is in the file
tzcodeC.tar.gz, where C is the code's version; similarly, the data are
in tzdataD.tar.gz, where D is the data's version. The following shell
commands download these files to a GNU/Linux or similar host; see the
downloaded README file for what to do next.

wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tz*.tar.gz'
gzip -dc tzcode*.tar.gz | tar -xf -
gzip -dc tzdata*.tar.gz | tar -xf -
The code lets you compile the tz source files into machine-readable
binary files, one for each location. It also lets you read a tz binary
file and interpret time stamps for that location."

The above quote is from: 
http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

The words "FTP distribution" in first sentence are link to:

ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/

There's a file:

tzdata2007a.tar.gz

on that page that appears to have the timezone files. I am guessing this
may be what the respondent was thinking about. I'm not sure how to use
them, but hopefully that should be self evident on examination. 

2. Version-specific patch info:
Solaris 10 - I don't have the info yet
Solaris 9 - requires 113225-03 or later and 112874-33 or later
Solaris 8 - requires 109810-02 or later and 108993-52 or later
Solaris 7 - may be available online, though OS reaches EOL in 2007
Solaris 2.6 and earlier - will have to rebuild from timezone data tables
at www.nih.gov using "zic"

3. A correspondent got the following info from Sun technical support
about whether you could rely on NTP to handle the timezone change (no),
and whether you absolutely had to reboot after timezone patches are
installed (yes):

"NTP uses UTC, universal time coordinated. It knows nothing about Time
Zones, which are an env variable.  Ramifications are unknown and no one
wanted to speculate. According to this Sun Alert:

Document Audience:      PUBLIC
Document ID:      102775
Title:      Daylight Saving Time (DST) Changes for Australia (2006),
Canada 
(2007), United States (2007) and Others
Update Date:      Wed Jan 17 00:00:00 MST 2007

'There is no easy way to avoid this issue. Attempts to change the TOD
clock of the system are temporary and will not resolve all the time zone
issues resolved by these patches. It is advised that the patches are
installed to resolve the time zone changes.'

When I asked around about this, I was told that we recommend that the
time zone patches be installed, regardless of the presence/absence of
NTP.  If problems do occur, installing the DST patch/patches will be
necessary.  System maintenance is unavoidable sometimes and Sun will
also be needing to do this in all our data centers worldwide."


-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 11:40 AM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: SUMMARY: patch for US daylight savings time changes on
Solaris2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7

Thanks to everyone for quick replies! Short answer is that since 2.5.1
and 2.6 are past EOL, I can pay sun $150K to provide me with patches, or
make the mods myself using:

/usr/sbin/zic 

on latest timezone tables downloaded from www.nih.gov
<http://www.nih.gov/> . This is supposed to be fairly straightforward.

Supposedly a Solaris 7 patch may actually be out there yet, as it's
reaching EOL in 2007.

It was also noted that these OS are very old, and really should be
updated - understood, but due to complicated circumstances probably
won't happen, definitely won't happen before March 26th. Sigh...

Thanks again!
_______________________________
Judith Reed


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