Cisco ONS 15300 Series

March 5, 2007

NOTICE:

THIS FIELD NOTICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS AND DOES NOT IMPLY ANY KIND OF GUARANTEE OR WARRANTY, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY. YOUR USE OF THE INFORMATION ON THE FIELD NOTICE OR MATERIALS LINKED FROM THE FIELD NOTICE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. CISCO RESERVES THE RIGHT TO CHANGE OR UPDATE THIS FIELD NOTICE AT ANY TIME.

Products Affected

Problem Description

Daylight Savings Time changes have been mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R.6.ENR), Section 110. These changes will go into effect in March 2007.

The Operating Systems of most optical products that support Daylight Savings Time have built in mechanisms to automatically change the time based on the pre-Energy Act US dates. Once the new Act is implemented, the time on devices that maintain time zone information will continue to change according to those dates, unless changes are made. See below for the pre-Energy Act dates and the new dates.

Background

On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act, which extends DST by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress, and then Congress retains the right to resume the 2005 DST schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete. This law takes effect on March 1, 2007.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, bill number H.R.6.ENR, can be found at The Library of Congress, THOMAS. Search for "daylight savings" to find the Act in various stages.

Problem Symptoms

Without the undertaking of the steps described in this notice, the potential problem is that the system time and all timestamps will be incorrect by an hour for three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall for year 2007 and beyond.

This can have a major impact on any event correlation activities that are performed as part of normal operations, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

For example, where logs may be captured, correlated, and stored for diagnostic or billing purposes, these time changes could render them incorrect for situations where they need to be recalled to rebuild a sequence of events. Incorrect timestamps may not be an issue for events that receive immediate action, but where future reference back to these events is needed, incorrect times would be reported.

In addition, any device with time based controls and activities, such as authentication servers, synchronization activities, and scheduled events such as batch jobs, timed backups, or automated scripts, and so on, would be impacted.

Workaround/Solution

To comply with this government mandate, Cisco has begun to take the necessary steps to conform to the new US Daylight Savings Time standard that will begin in March 2007.

The intent of this document is to inform Cisco customers of the plan that Cisco is preparing in order to bring the Unified Communications applications and associated platforms into compliance with this new US government mandate.

The following releases have been updated to accommodate these changes and should be applied where deemed necessary.

DDTS

To follow the bug ID link below and see detailed bug information, you must be a registered user and you must be logged in.

Revision History

For More Information

If you require further assistance, or if you have any further questions regarding this field notice, please contact the Cisco Systems Technical Assistance Center (TAC) by one of the following methods:

• Open a service request on Cisco.com
• By email
• By telephone

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