Lotus Notes Locations & DST Thomas Zehetbauer (thomasz@HOSTMASTER.ORG) Thu, 8 Apr 1999 12:25:08 +0200 --HlL+5n6rz5pIUxbD Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Lotus Notes may under some circumstances silently change the System time. This happend here with "Location"="Office (Network)", "Local time zone"="Central European Time", and "Daylight savings time"="Not observed here". Because this could cause severe problems with any software that uses time stamping any application not specifically designed for time maintainance should prompt the user before tampering with the system time. Thomas Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. ------------------------------------------------- T h o m a s Z e h e t b a u e r ( TZ251 ) PGP encrypted mail preferred - KeyID 96FFCB89 mail pgp-key-request@hostmaster.org ------------------------------------------------- --HlL+5n6rz5pIUxbD Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia iQEVAgUBNwyEA2D1OYqW/8uJAQGsTwf7B7hTapwlTG7XKB2Sk/W0ofCYw7Ygv8mB tnVSzrxTKoaGlZEnDM4mwCZKNCMkN31rT1xBWUMeeDsozvA+U/O+qWxOFK5w1rGI JlxdoyOxuHUnR88aZemjWZ8tiR71mo0u7o8PzdvJCfZfmjU2Fltj6Bo3GFFmvEmb t2l+cVZWqQ03ED8+4soZ2oEsnKgSKnnbyvt2y6qqCpFAYI3QBMN5j93qMDOmA8Yw JhiOojnXpEE6xCtNXDX5fCH/pJrw2eFCZHQKkZX2K7s/JekTlInsfx1daU5nDvBt c/4dgmCShWLf/sF2BLAHN+YclPCYbR72E+t+sWitt06Wb+EUgwARcw== =GZBH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --HlL+5n6rz5pIUxbD-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GMT (Was: Re: Lotus Notes Locations & DST) Ken Williams (jkwilli2@UNITY.NCSU.EDU) Thu, 8 Apr 1999 16:27:03 -0400 as somebody mentioned recently (i think on ntbugtraq?), i think all "mission critical" or "production" or [insert favorite buzzword here] apps, servers and networks should use GMT, and only GMT, to avoid such problems. NT4+SP4 apparently doesn't like daylite savings time in certain situations, so that's all the more reason to stick with GMT. Ken Williams jkwilli2@csc.ncsu.edu Packet Storm Security http://packetstorm.genocide2600.com/ Trinux: Linux Security Toolkit http://www.trinux.org/ ftp://ftp.trinux.org PGP DH/DSS/RSA Public Keys http://packetstorm.genocide2600.com/pgpkey/ E.H.A.P. VP & Head of Operations http://www.ehap.org/ tattooman@ehap.org NCSU Computer Science http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/ jkwilli2@csc.ncsu.edu SHANG: Secure Highly Available Networking Group http://shang.csc.ncsu.edu/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lotus Notes Locations & DST Anto Veldre (anto.veldre@TALINVEST.EE) Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:54:41 +0300 > T h o m a s Z e h e t b a u e r ( TZ251 ) wrote: >Lotus Notes may under some circumstances silently change the System time. >This happend here with "Location"="Office (Network)", "Local time zone"="Central European Time", and "Daylight savings >time"="Not observed here". >Because this could cause severe problems with any software that uses time stamping any application not specifically >designed for time maintainance should prompt the user before tampering with the system time. > I am currently using the following Notes client program on my laptop: Lotus 4.6a [Intl] 21 November 1997. Some notes considering the summer time switching. "Observe Daylight savings" is checked in my Notes client, "Automatically adjust clock" is checked in "Control Panel->Date&Time" Operating system is Win95 OSR2. It happened last month that an important meeting was appointed ( 23 of March 1999 10:00 , local time). After switching to summer time (02:00 changed to 03:00 local time early morning at 23rd of March, automatically, by OS), the meeting moved +1 hour and appeared at 11:00. I checked this with another party of the meeting, he saw the same results on his PC. Luckily we both remebered the actual time.... I use Notes calendar function too rarely to make some/other final conclusion. Anto Veldre, anto.veldre@talinvest.ee ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: Lotus Notes Locations & DST Peter Zuerrer (pzu@CH.IBM.COM) Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:41:20 +0200 It may be worthwhile to verify that your Notes servers do correctly handle daylight savings time (DST). An additional parameter must be added to each server's NOTES.INI file to specify DST start and end dates in the country where the server is located. See the setting of the environment variable DSTLaw below. The syntax is somewhat similar to the TCP/IP TZ variable. In countries that observe DST, Notes clients must be set to observe DST. An additional parameter must be added to each user's NOTES.INI file to specify DST start and end dates in the user's country. See the setting of the environment variable DSTLaw below. The syntax is somewhat similar to the TCP/IP TZ variable. The following script opens the names file NAMES.NSF, looks for the locations documents in the database, and changes the flag controlling whether or not DST should be observed. The script could be placed in a button hotspot in a note and sent by the Notes administrator to all users... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- Sub Click(Source As Button) Dim session As New notessession Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "DSTLaw", "3 -1 1 10 -1 1",1) Dim namevar As String namevar = session.getenvironmentstring("NAMES",1) If namevar = "" Then namevar = "names.nsf" End If Dim db As New notesdatabase ("",namevar) If db.isopen Then Dim view As NotesView Dim doc As NotesDocument Set view = db.GetView("Locations") Set doc = view.GetFirstDocument While Not(doc Is Nothing) doc.DST = "1" Call doc.Save( True, True ) Set doc = view.GetNextDocument(doc) Wend Messagebox "All your Notes Locations have been set to Observe Daylight Saving",,"Daylight Savings Time" Else Messagebox "You do not have a Private Address Book named " + namevar,,"Daylight Savings Time" End If End Sub --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- Peter Zuerrer