Time Travel the Daylight Savings Time Way

Over here, we change the clocks tonight. It is a random event decided by the government.

But that is not the point of this blog post.

Governments suck at understanding technology, be it farming or digital, they should just stop messing with us.

But I digress.

While working on a client site I noticed that the log file view shows a time, say 9:45am-10:02am.

When you open the document, I saw 8:45am times.
Please be aware this will not hurt your server in any way as it is a client side view issue, not a server side issue. Well, in this case.

Whoa! Daylight Saving Time issue! DST sucks!

Hang on a second. I am in Israel, +2 of GMT, customer servers are in EST.

My admin client of course runs local time for me. I am used to seeing log times in funny ways but this bothered me. I checked the server console, time stamp and date is correct. We checked the OS itself, also correct.

In a Skype chat with some friends, I posted the issue, this was an AIX server by the way, I also posted this Technote # LO68032 from IBM which describes it perfectly well.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1LO68032

Unfortunately it states "This APAR is closed as FIN. We have deferred the fix to a future release."

And not in the 9.x stream.

I tried other servers at the same client, same problem.

I then tried other customer sites, no problem.

While discussing it with Susan, she advised that it would not be a problem after this coming Monday based on the historical dates for the time changes. Kudos to Susan who is always helpful and up to date with information. Note to her boss, you do not pay here enough!

The work around is to change the OS to EST then restart Notes and that works. 

However, I am interested in what caused it and how to fix it.

It occurred to me that this was the only client I was using a specific CISCO VPN and client (5.0.07.0290) which I do not use for any other clients.

It would seem to me that the problem lies not with IBM, Notes or Domino but with the VPN from the customer and the settings or policies it enforces when I login to it.

So maybe IBM should revisit that technote and customer and see if a VPN was involved. In the mean time I am opening a ticket at the customer site...after Monday if it still happens.