Summer clock in Israel for 2005

Summer clock (Daylight Savings Time or DST) in Israel for 2005
On the 1st of April Israel will be switching to Daylight Savings Time (aka “Summer clock”) and as every year we are facing the need to update our servers and workstations with new settings based upon our government’s current political position.
That’s right ! Israel is rather special when it comes to summer clock – the actual dates of summer clock’s beginning and ending are decided every year in Knesset, so we, the sysadmins, every year have to update our environment with the new settings.
This year’s dates are:

  • Beginning: April 1st, 2005 at 2 AM – First Friday of April
  • End: October 9th 2005 at 2 AM – Second Sunday of October

For a 2006 version of this document and Time Zone tool please read Summer clock in Israel for 2006.
The common practice is to use tzedit.exe utility from the NT4 Resource Kit, which updates the registry on the machine you run the tool on.
This year I have decided to take a slightly different approach. Heck, scripting the update for the clients and running around is not exactly my cup of tea. This year I fired Visual Studio and decided to write something that will let me do the updates without any client intervention. It was also a good opportunity to give a test ride to VB.NET (I’m not a coder and most of what I write is VBScript, Batch, BASH, etc…).
I ended up with application I called TZ2005. What you will find inside is an executable and the source code (please be gentle – this IS my first time with VB.NET). The application requires .NET Framework, which you can get from HERE.
So how do you use it ? Well, this is rather self-explaining:

Updates the computer with Israel Daylight Savings settings for year 2005
tz2005.exe [hostname] [/restore]
/? Displays this help.
/restore Restores Microsoft's original settings.
Running the executable without arguments will update localhost to new Daylight Savings settings.

You can update a remote host by running something like:

Or you can restore the Microsoft's original settings by running:
Some caveats:
  • You need .NET Framework on the computer you are running the application from.
  • You need to run the application from local hard drive. .NET applications invoked from network drive run with restricted privileges.
  • If you are updating remote host, your account has to have write access to the relevant keys (being in Administrators group of the remote host is more than enough) and Remote Registry service has to be running on the remote host (duh!!)
  • The tool will not work on Windows 9x clients - do not even try ! I do not work with those and have not tested the application on 9x. Sorry, get yourself a real OS

Support

No support of any sort will be given for this script/tool or for any other script/tool found on the Petri.co.il website for that matter. If you need to contact us with any support issues, feedback or suggestions regarding the tool(s) and script(s) found on this page please write an e-mail to THIS address.

Links

Guy's Windowmaker's Bloglink out ico Download TZ2005 (21kb)link out ico Download .NET Framework v1.1 (23.1mb)link out ico