New DST effect on OPENVMS

[Atul Subhedar]

Hi ,

I am having 2 openvms servers and like to know how there is a effect of new DST policy (2007) i.e. time change in March 2nd week , march 11 2007 on the openvms and Alpha server hardware.
Details:
1. Alpha Server 1000A 5/400 - Openvms 6.2
2. Alpha Server 800 5/400 - Openvms 7.1

do we need to apply any patches to firmware or openvms ?
how time can be changed?
is there any manual procedure ?

Thanks,

Atul

[Andy Bustamante]

Welcome to the VMS forum. You might want to look at last week's thread on the same topic: http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1087761



Andy

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

For 6.2 the patch is
http://www5.itrc.hp.com/service/patch/patchDetail.do?patchid=ALPTZ01_062&sel={openvms:alpha:6.2-1h3,}&BC=main|search|

I didn't find the patch for 7.1 !

May be prefer to do it manually by submitting a job that will correct the time.

Wim

[Atul Subhedar]

Hi ,

I come to know from my prvious sysadmin that , we are doing time change manually.
So I think as per the link pasted , I do not need to apply patches.

I can follow the same process of manually updating time.

or do I still need a patches to be applied?

Thanks,

Atul

[EdgarZamora_1]

Right. If you don't care about the DST and TimeZone rules changing, and you just want to manually change the system time when it comes time to change it, then you don't need to apply the TZ patch. Besides, I'm 99% sure there isn't a patch for your 7.1 system anyway.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

It's only a question of having the correct time zone definitions. The patch installs [SYSUPD]DTSS$TIMEZONE_RULES. Thus you can install the file manually too.

But I think the manual system is easier to implement. We already had lots of problems with DTSS time changes (due to bad zone setup, bad timezone files, bugs, ...).

On 6.2 we once had that DTSS time syncs (nothing to do with timezones) resulted in jobs starting a few millisecs too soon. And because they started themself on the next occurence of the same hour, they ran twice.

Wim

[John Gillings]

re: Wim,

>I didn't find the patch for 7.1 !

And you won't ever find one from HP. Patches will only be released for OS versions that are in "Supported" or "Prior Version Support" categories. At the moment that includes VAX V5.5-2, VAX V6.2, VAX V7.3, Alpha V6.2, Alpha V7.3-2, Alpha V8.2, Alpha V8.3, I64 V8.2 and I64 V8.3.

In this particular case, it's possible to fix it yourself on any version by editing the timezone definitions and running ZIC. Your local customer support centre can help (if they claim ignorance, tell them to contact the guys in Sydney).

[Jim_McKinney]

Is just building a new ruleset with the ZIC compiler sufficient?

When the DST patches were released for the supported versions of VMS there were two components - a TZ kit that did the equivalent of the changes one could make with the ZIC compiler, and, another that provided a replacement for the C RTL. Any knowledge as to why changes to the C RTL are required (or perhaps they're not)?

[Hoff]

This inclusion of a C RTL image is probably related to an issue with tzset; either a back-port of various of the changes for V7.0 timezone management, or a rebuild of the old C RTL with the altered TZ rules. The following text is extracted from some (other, far older) C RTL documentation, as it appears relevant here:

"7 Known Problems

The object library provides only the new functions. This allows an application program to link the objects as part of your image. What it does not provide is infrastructure supplied with OpenVMS. There are two examples of this infrastructure that you must consider.

...

The second infrastructure problem is with timezone files which were added in OpenVMS V7.0. The function tzset will not locate
the timezone files on earlier systems. In order not to have functions call the UTC variants, you may need to define _VMS_V6_SOURCE prior to the inclusion of header files. Note that the timezone support does allow you to avoid the need for the external timezone files by defining TZ to be a time zone string, in the form dictated by the POSIX specification. See the documentation of the tzset function in the Reference Manual for more information."

[Jim_McKinney]

Thank you for the info regarding potential issues with tzset().