blindsquirrel.org

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.