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.

Just when you thought you had all of your Daylight Saving Time (DST) patching complete, Sun releases the following support article about backward compatibility issues with JDK and JRE. Are you really sure you’re patching is done?

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/alert.html

We’ve done pretty much all we can to deal with the new Extended Daylight Saving Time situation at work.  Even after all the patching, the Exchange Calendar item rebasing, and testing, I still believe Outlook Calendars are going to be wrong.  I discussed this point, at length, with a lot of very, very smart people at Microsoft, but they keep telling me that everything we’ve done is correct, and everything we see is expected behavior.

Expected behavior.  Hmmmm.  See, we patched the OS and ran the Exchange Update Tool, so now when we look at Calendar items that are after 3/11 some of them show as one hour off.  I don’t believe they should.  I believe that Outlook should (and always has) automatically adjust what we, as humans, see when we look at out Calendars so that 9am eastern is 9am eastern today, next week, after April 1st, and after November 4th.   But according to those same very, very smart people I spoke with, what we see is expected behavior and they didn’t have time to update Outlook – so it will be “messy” until the time change.

We’ll see.  I bet them a nickel that they were wrong about this one and it’s a bet I am really hoping I will lose.  But I have a bad feeling that come 02:01 in the morning on the 11th I’ll already have the email drafted for all of our users to explain how to manually fix all of those appointments that Microsoft assured us would automatically adjust.

Here’s hoping I lose this bet.