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PilotManager Timezone/Daylight Savings Frequently Asked Questions

Congratulations!  Your OS has a bug in the time of day code.
This bug causes dates to slowly travel backwards in time
and interferes with PilotManager's performance.

PilotManager will not function until this is fixed.
(This is NOT a bug in PilotManager!)

The Pilot and unix store times in different formats. This bug makes PilotManager unable to reliably convert between these formats. This makes it very dangerous to modify any records because times may get set incorrectly! For this reason PilotManager refuses to sync.

How do I fix it??

There are three possible solutions which should be tried in this order:

1. Apply a Solaris patch to fix the bug.
2. Change your TZ (timezone) environment variable to a setting that doesn't hit the bug.
3. Update your perl installation with a patched file to avoid the bug.

• Apply a Solaris patch.
  The following patches should fix the problem:
  • Patch 105210 for Solaris 2.6
  • Patch 103612 for Solaris 2.5.1
  These patches can be retrieved from sunsolve.sun.com.

• Change your TZ environment variable.
  Using the following timezone settings will avoid the bug in most cases:

  PST8PDT	Pacific time
  MST7MDT	Mountain time
  CST6CDT	Central time
  EST5EDT	Eastern time
  WET	Western European time
  MET	Middle European time
  EET	Eastern European time

  I have not heard of timezone problems from any Asian timezones.

  How do I change the TZ setting?

  The best way to go here is to make a permanent, system-wide change so you never have to deal with this again. Doing this requires root access on your system. Edit the file /etc/TIMEZONE and change the TZ line to the new setting. After rebooting the TZ setting will be changed everywhere.

  If you don't have root access to your system then try one of the following solutions:

  1. Put the new setting in your login or shell startup scripts, such as .login or .cshrc in your home directory. For example, you could put the line setenv TZ PST8PDT in your .cshrc file. On your next login the new TZ setting would take effect.

  2. Make a startup script for PilotManager which sets TZ to the correct value.

     #!/bin/sh
     TZ=PST8PDT; export TZ
     cd path/pilotmgr
     ./PilotManager
     

     Create the script above, replacing PST8PDT with the timezone you want and path with the full path to your PilotManager installation. Make the script executable:

     prompt% chmod a+x scriptname
     

     where scriptname is the name of the script, such as pilotmgr. Now just run this script and PilotManager will see the new TZ setting.

• Patch your perl installation.
  The above should fix the problem in most cases. However, if you still get the popup dialog from PilotManager then proceed with the solution below. This assumes you are using perl version 5.003. The patch below is already included in later versions of perl.
  1. cd into your pilotmgr directory
  2. mkdir lib/perl5/Time
  3. Download this file: Local.pm
     and put it in the directory created above. You should now have the file lib/perl5/Time/Local.pm
  4. Run PilotManager. The message should go away.