e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Daylight savings approaching

Daylight savings starts here in Sydney this coming weekend. As you probably know, the USA changed their daylight savings start and end times this year, and Australia promptly followed suit. For OpenVMS, this means that a change needs to be made to the timezone rules, especially if you have SYSGEN parameter AUTO_DLIGHT_SAV set to 1.

For our North American cousins, HP was kind enough to release a patch to deal with this, but we here in Sydney seem to have been ignored. Therefore, you have to manually change this (or at least check if it's correct).

Download an appropriate timezone rule file from ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/ and extract the Australasia and leapseconds files. Stick them in SYS$COMMON:[SYS$ZONEINFO.SYSTEM.SOURCES] and compile it using ZIC (see the documentation if you don't know how to do this).

The resulting compiled files can then be moved to SYS$COMMON:[SYS$ZONEINFO.SYSTEM.AUSTRALIA] and you need to execute SYS$MANAGER:UTC$TIME_SETUP.COM to update the logical SYS$TIMEZONE_RULE, which should, if your computers are on Sydney time, equate to "EST-10EST-11,M10.1.0/02,M4.1.0/03".