Field Notice: FN - 62707 - U.S. Daylight Savings Time Policy Changes Effective March 2007 - for Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE)

February 13, 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.

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Products Affected

Products Affected	Comments
CallMgr XML SDK - No Version	Release 2.3(x) only

Problem Description

According to a new policy act, the US Government will extend daylight saving time in the United States starting in March 2007.

The Operating Systems of most Cisco products that support Daylight Savings Time 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 Daylight Saving Time (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 Congress, and then Congress retains the right to resume the 2005 Daylight Saving Time schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete. This law takes effect March 1, 2007.

Table 1 Summary of changes to Daylight Savings Time

Event	Prior to 2007	2007 and After
Start	First Sunday in April	Second Sunday in March
End	Last Sunday in October	First Sunday in November

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, bill number H.R.6.ENR, can be found at the Library of Congress - Thomas Home website. Search for "Daylight Savings" to find the Act in various stages.

The Cisco Unity Connection Server Updates wizard installs the latest Microsoft updates that are required with Cisco Unity Connection. The DST fix for Unity Connection will be included in CiscoUnityConnection1.2.1ES21.exe which is available for download from the Unity Connection software download page (registered customers only) , provided the proper Cisco support contract is in place.

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, with security related devices, where logs may be captured, correlated, and stored for future reference, this time change could render them 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.

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 on 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 Cisco Unified Application Environment software does not need updates to correct for the new Daylight Savoings Time changes. However, the appropriate patches for Microsoft Windows 2003 must be applied. The Daylight Savings Time patches may be obtained from the Microsoft Download Center.

Revision History

Revision	Date	Comment
1.0	13-FEB-2007	Initial Public Release

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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