veritas: VCS Java Console Logs showing wrong date & timezone

I have a number of Veritas clustered environments that I maintain. I monitor these clusters through the Veritas Cluster Manager JAVA console running on my Windows 7 workstation.

For the last couple of weeks, I have noticed the VCS logs where showing the wrong date and time. Here is a screen shot showing the time I logged in. At the time it was 1 day and almost 12 hours behind.

Beginning in 2007 the U.S.A. and other countries changed the way Daylight Savings Time is scheduled.  The Symantec provided Java Runtime Environments (JREs), VRTSjre,  and VRTSjre15, are affected by the changes in DST. This will cause the time reported internally by the JRE to be off by 1 hour for 4 weeks each year, causing incorrect date and time processing for Symantec applications relying on these JREs. The new DST rules will went into effect in March 2007. To comply with the DST changes, updates to the JREs must be provided.  This is done by either by applying an update to your Symantec product or with a JRE update tool provided by the vendor as described below.
This affects VRTSjre (Java 1.4), VRTSjre15 (Java 1.5),  and 3.2 / 3.3 versions of Veritas Enterprise Administrator (VEA) on all platforms currently supported by these components.

1. To investigate this issue you will need to ensure first if the primary VRTSvcs log from the host is also not showing the wrong date and time:

 Log location: /var/VRTSvcs/log/engine.log_A

2. Also you can double check by running an X Windows session , exporting your DISPLAY variables  and run the hagui locally from the primary host. Then ensure the VCS logs dont also show the wrong date and time.

 # DISPLAY=ip-address:0;export DISPLAY
 # hagui &

By running through the above two basic steps you can confirm which JRE session is having the issue.

Either from your Workstation or the Primary Host.

In my Case the issue was coming from my Windows 7 Workstation.

The following steps will show you how to apply the Java Runtime Environment Timezone Database Update tool to the VRTSjre and Veritas Enterprise Administrator for Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes.

1. You will need to download the latest tzupdater tool to update my JRE timezone running on your workstation.

You should be able to download it from the following link: http://java.sun.com/javase/tzupdater_README.html

2. You must log in using a valid Sun Online account to download.  There is an option to register and create a new account if needed. Log in using your Sun Online account

3. Once you are logged in, agree to the license. This is required to download the tool

4. Click on the Java Standard Edition (SE) download section, and click on the timezone tool download.

5. Once downloaded extract the files to a temporary directory on your workstation, 

6. Update the implementation of the JRE as follows:
For Windows systems, bring up a command prompt session and run the following:

 # cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\VERITAS Shared\VRTSjre\jre1.5\bin\
 java -jar C:\javatz\tzupdater.jar -f -bc -v

To verify:

 # java -jar C:\javatz\tzupdater.jar -t -v

 # cd c:\Program Files\VERITAS\VERITAS Object Bus\jre\bin
 java -jar C:\javatz\tzupdater.jar -f -bc -v

To verify:

 # java -jar C:\javatz\tzupdater.jar -f -bc -v

7. Once you have applied the update to the Java Runtime Environment , you can start a new Veritas Cluster Management JAVA console and ensure the VCS logs have the correct date and time.

8. If you continue to experience issues I suggest to uninstall the Veritas Cluster Management JAVA console, upgrade to the latest version which at time of this post is 5.1.00.2.

5.1 Veritas Cluster Management Console version is backwards compatible. And can be downloaded from the following location:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH78415