Cisco IPICS PMC Client Software

February 2, 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

In August, 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, bill number H.R.6.ENR, which includes the extension of daylight saving time (DST) in the United States. Beginning in 2007, DST starts on March 11 and ends on November 4. These dates differ from the previous DST start and stop dates that began on the first Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October.

The operating systems of most Cisco products that support DST contain built-in mechanisms to automatically change the time, based on the current US rules. After the DST changes are implemented, the time on devices that maintain time zone information will continue to change according to the former DST rules unless changes are made.

Background

On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act, which extends Daylight Savings Time (DST) by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to end on the first Sunday of November. This law becomes effective on March 1, 2007.

The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress, and then Congress retains the right to resume the 2005 Daylight Savings 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

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

Problem Symptoms

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

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

For example, this time change could render security-related devices - where logs may be captured, correlated, and stored for future reference - incorrect for situations where they must 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 contain 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.

For Cisco IPICS, this change means that server software, PMC software, and activity log timestamps will be incorrect by one hour during the period of time that is affected by the new DST specifications. With the enforcement of licenses based on server timestamps, it may be possible to render Cisco IPICS licensed functions inoperable if the server time is manually altered.

Workaround/Solution

Workaround:

In Cisco IPICS version 1.0 and 1.1, the server time must be manually changed by setting the clock back or forward by one hour. You can change the time by logging into the Cisco IPICS server by using the root user ID and executing the date command with the appropriate arguments.

Note: Before you change system time, read and understand the Warning below.

To display the current date, enter the date command with no arguments, as shown in the following example:

[root@ipics2 root]# date 
Tue Jan 30 12:41:47 EST 2007

To change the date, enter the date command with the MMDDHHMMYYYY argument. See WARNING below, before changing the system time.

where:

MM=Month 
DD=Day 
HH=Hour (24 hour clock) 
MM=Minute 
YYYY=Year

The following example sets the time and date to 13:42 January 30, 2007:

[root@ipics2 root]# date 013013422007 
Tue Jan 30 13:42:00 EST 2007 
[root@ipics2 root]#

WARNING

Cisco IPICS systems that use time-bound (evaluation) licenses can experience issues if the date or time is changed. If you are using a time-bound license and need to adjust your time, please send an email to ask-ipics-support@external.cisco.com and place "Daylight Savings" in the Subject line. The IPICS support team will contact you with special handling instructions.

Purchased licenses are permanent and are not affected by changes to the date or time.

To determine if your license is time-bound, run the following command from the root user ID on your Cisco IPICS server:

[root@ipics2 root]# grep "cisco 1.0" /root/tomcat/current/webapps/license/*.lic 
[root@ipics2 root]# grep "cisco 1.0" /root/tomcat/current/webapps/license/*.lic 
INCREMENT IPICS_BASE_0_SERVER_SW cisco 1.0 permanent 1 \ 
INCREMENT VIP_PMC_PORTS cisco 1.0 permanent 20 \ 
INCREMENT VIP_IPP_PORTS cisco 1.0 permanent 20 \ 
INCREMENT VIP_MCAST_PORTS cisco 1.0 permanent 50 \ 
INCREMENT IPICS_OPS_VIEW cisco 1.0 permanent 20 \ 
INCREMENT VIP_PSTN_PORTS cisco 1.0 permanent 100 \ 
INCREMENT VIP_LMR_PORTS cisco 1.0 permanent 50 \ 
INCREMENT IPPE_BASE_SERVER cisco 1.0 permanent 1 \ 
[root@ipics2 root]#

The above example shows the feature line output for a non-time-bound license. You can tell that this license is permanent by the presence of the word "permanent" in the output. By contrast, a time-bound license shows the expiration date of the license in place of the word "permanent."

WARNING

Solution:

Automatic Daylight Savings Time support will be integrated in all upcoming versions of IPICS. Upgrading to the next release when it becomes available will solve this issue. The next release will be Cisco IPICS 2.0. Use the Product Upgrade Tool (PUT) on cisco.com.

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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