berniedolan

DST changes: Use TZupdater if you can't upgrade your JVM

January 30, 2007

As mentioned in several posts lately (like this one by Damon Cooper and here by Sarge) the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time are changing this year. This has a direct impact on ColdFusion since these timezone changes are only supported in version 1.4.2_11 or later of Sun's JVM. Adobe is recommending that you upgrade the JVM used by your ColdFusion installation as outlined in this technote.

In some cases you might be unable, or unwilling, to upgrade your JVM. Sun has also provided their TZupdater Tool for this purpose. As mentioned on their site, "this tool provides a route of updating timezone data while leaving other system configuration and dependencies unchanged."

To be clear -- as far as I can tell, Adobe has not officially endorsed the TZUpdater Tool, and Sun mentions the preferred method is to upgrade the JVM, but this at least leaves you with an option if you need it.

UPDATE: The TZUpdater Tool can only be used for version 1.4 or later of the JVM. Also, Adobe now has 3 technotes regarding the DST issue as noted here by Damon Cooper.

Comments (4) | Related Categories: ColdFusion

4 responses to “DST changes: Use TZupdater if you can't upgrade your JVM”

Cris Mooney
Mar 2, 2007 at 6:29 PM

Win OS DST 2007 patch may require full OS reboot in some cases. We run CF "7,0,2,142559" on Sun's JVM "1.5.0-b64", and on our Feb 28 JVM restart (just service, not OS) some of our production servers reported that ColdFusion was off by 5 hours. Presumably the source was the Sun JVM, and being we are EST we believe it reverted to GMT. The hosting group reported that they had applied the Windows DST 2007 patches (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931836/) to all these machines, sometime between last JVM restart and the current restart. In our case a full OS reboot of the problematic web servers solved our time issue. The only difference we could find was that the problem servers had been up 48 days, while the others had been OS rebooted recently. Presumably, the Win OS DST patches were applied without OS reboot, and the JVM restart did not sync well without full Win OS reboot. On a more relevant note to this thread, "1.5.0-b64" is not patched for DST March 11 as noted at "http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST_Faq.html", since "1.5.0xxx" is the same as "5.0xxx", and we need "u6" (update 6) not an earlier beta. We will be trying the Tzupdater, and I will try and report back success.

Bernie Dolan
Mar 3, 2007 at 2:23 AM

Hi Cris -- thanks very much for this info -- hopefully it will be helpful for others who stumble across this post. One comment though (just in case you run into other problems) -- I don't think CF 7.0.2 is currently officially certified to run on v1.5 of the JVM (though I think I've heard of folks doing so -- including you now :). See the System Requirements page for details: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/productinfo/systemreqs/ It looks like it's only certified for 1.4.2 versions.

Tom Mollerus
Apr 4, 2007 at 7:54 PM

Great posting, Bernie-- I had a few scheduled tasks that seemed to run an hour late after the DST change. Did you successfully apply the TZUpdater at Sun Life, or did you apply Adobe's patch?

Bernie Dolan
Apr 4, 2007 at 9:56 PM

Hi Tom -- thanks. We applied the TZUpdater and it worked fine. Adobe was actually recommending that you upgrade to the latest JRE, but using the TZUpdater seemed like a safer route given the short time frame and complexity of our applications.