Burned by DST and a formerly great thin client

Posted on by

Anyone have any way to deal with the new Extended Daylight Saving Time rules on old NCD thin clients?  They were a great thin client.  They had an excellent way to handle management as NCD owned UDP port 128, which you could tell all your routers to forward to a central Data Center and self configure.  If you had your central management server setup correctly you could have users in the field take a new ThinSTAR out of the box, plug in all the cables, turn it on and it would completely self configure.  It was a thing of beauty.

Then NCD went out of business and nobody cared about the existing hardware anymore.  Enter the new DST 2007 rules and you end up with thousands of immediate boat anchors as there is no DST patch for WinCE 2.12.  Very unfortunate.  For now we made the decision to fake their time zone information so that the time and existing Outlook Calendar items show up correctly, but if you create any new Calendar items between 3/11 – 4/1 or 10/28 – 11/4 they will be off an hour and you will have to go back and manually adjust them.  Add to that the fact that you have to make those time zone changes 4 times a year and the decision to dump them becomes apparent.  The problem is the cost to replace a couple thousand of them is not small.

It’s a shame there was no other solution for the ThinSTARs as they really were excellent little workhorses in a thin client / Citrix shop.

  • Forrest Shields

    We are in the same boat. Over half our company runs on ThinSTAR terminals, but when DST 2007 came along we decided that we’d have to finally replace them with PCs. As a non-profit organization however we just don’t have the means to do so. So we continue to change the time multiple times a year. Please keep me informed if you find a solution.

  • blindsquirrel

    We’ll never find a solution. We made the decision to replace them all over a couple of years. What a shame. Changing the timezone isn’t the big deal, but any Outlook appointments that people make during the extended period end up wrong when we change the timezones back. Frustrating. We decided to go with Wyse and end it.