Cisco DPA 7600 Series Gateways

February 09, 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 Cisco products that support Daylight Saving Time (DST) have built in mechanisms to automatically change the times, based on current United States rules. Once the new act is implemented, the time on devices that maintain time zone information will continue to change according to the old rules, unless changes are made.

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 end on the first Sunday of November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to the Congress, and then the Congress retains the right to resume the 2005 DST schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete. This law takes effect 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

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 the year of 2007 and beyond, unless the steps described in this notice are taken.

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

For example, Call Detail Records, where logs may be captured, correlated, and stored for billing purposes, could be rendered incorrect for situations where they need to be recalled to rebuild a sequence of events. The incorrect timestamps may not be an issue for events that get immediate action, but future reference back to these events would reference incorrect times.

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 would be impacted.

DPA-7610 and DPA-7630 are not affected by the changes in DST since they have no system-affecting events or time-keeping.

Workaround/Solution

Workaround:

None.

Solution:

There are no system-affecting events or time-keeping for the DPA-7610 and DPA-7630; therefore, the DPAs are not affected by the changes in DST. Consequently, no DST fixes are specifically required for the DPA products.

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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