EPM and incorrect timezone offsets

I have a mixture of phones in my environment. Polycom Soundpoints and Cisco SPAs. I am running End Point Manager 2.10.3.7. My timezone is set to America/Los Angeles in Endpoint Advanced Settings. This is July, so daylight savings applies.

The Polycom phones are all displaying the correct time, but the settings, IMO, are incorrect. The settings in the generated Server_325.cfg look like this:

tcpIpApp.sntp.address="192.168.2.20" tcpIpApp.sntp.address.overrideDHCP="1" tcpIpApp.sntp.gmtOffset="-25200" tcpIpApp.sntp.gmtOffset.overrideDHCP="1" tcpIpApp.sntp.daylightSavings.enable="0"

What I would expect would be that gmtOffset is set to -28800 (for -8 GMT), and daylight savings would be enabled. Thus, since it is PDT now, that equates to the -7GMT or -25200. EMP is getting the phones to display the correct time, but in an incorrect way. I would expect to have time display problems at the end of DST in the fall with these settings.

The Cisco SPA phones are all displaying a time 1 hour ahead of the proper time. The settings generated by EPM are:

<Primary_NTP_Server ua="na">192.168.2.20</Primary_NTP_Server> <Time_Zone ua="na">GMT-7:00</Time_Zone> <Daylight_Saving_Time_Rule ua="na">start=3/8/7/02:0:0;end=11/1/7/02:0:0;save=1</Daylight_Saving_Time_Rule> <Daylight_Saving_Time_Enable group="Regional/Miscellaneous">Yes</Daylight_Saving_Time_Enable>

Again, the EPM generates an incorrect time zone offset. It should be GMT-8:00, but this time, it enables daylight savings. So the result on the phones is a time 1hour ahead of the correct time.

I have tried other pacific time zones as well as and east coast time zone. I always get an incorrect offset that is 1 hour off. Why is EPM setting incorrect time zone offset data? If I could get the correct offset and enable DST for all phones, then my phones would show the correct times. Much thanks for anyone who can help me with this.

I kind of see what the problem is now. EPM is doing a zdump of the time data in the timezone folder of the system. When I zdump my localtime, which is set to America/Los Angeles in the CentOS system, it brings this up:

/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 09:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2012 PST isdst=0 gmtoff=-28800 /etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 10:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2012 PDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-25200 /etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 08:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2012 PDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-25200 /etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 09:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2012 PST isdst=0 gmtoff=-28800

I think that EPM is choosing to use the gmtoffset for Daylight Time because it is currently daylight time, which is -7 GMT or -25200. This implies that come November the clocks on the phone will not automatically turn back to standard time, but will need a rebuild/reboot for that to happen. Also, I will have a different time problem, as the Polycoms will be off, and the Ciscos will be correct.

I would much rather it only used the the Standard Time where the lines read isdst=0 (in my case -28800), and let the PHONES handle the DST clock changes.

Well you are using a convoluted version of PHP (less than 5.3) which means I had to MAKE UP the timezone library that ONLY exists in PHP 5.3. If you want accurate timezone data then you should considering upgrading PHP to something higher than 5.3.

I am (by myself…for free…with no pay) slowly working on making all phones auto correct for DST. It takes some time.