daylight saving new zealand

Just advance your clock by one hour in System Preferences!

Yes I need this as well as I have a large network of Macs that needs to have their clock updated. I use a central time server, but it would be better if the individual machines had the same DST rules as the server!

Glenn Anderson's full page is here: http://www.mactcp.org.nz/nzdt.html

Cheers, Chris W.

From MacFixit today:

New Zealand/Mac OS X daylight saving conundrum: workaround
As noted by Apple Knowledge Base document #306486,

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306486

in the second half of 2007, New Zealand will begin 27 weeks of Daylight Saving Time. "This means that clocks will be set forward to Daylight Saving time on Sunday 30-September-2007, instead of on the first Sunday in October as in previous years." This will cause Mac OS X systems in New Zealand to display the wrong time after September 30th.

Apple offers a manual workaround that must be performed after September 30th, as follows:
• From Date & Time in System Preferences, deselect "Set Date & Time automatically"
• Manually set the correct time.
• CClick Save.
• On 07-October-2007, reselect 'Set Date & Time automatically' or manually set the correct time again.

Meanwhile, a user has created a third-party software solution that updates
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Auckland with the current rules, re-links /usr/share/zoneinfo/NZ to that, updates /usr/share/icu/icudt32b.dat, and updates /usr/share/icu/icudt32l.dat if it exists (it doesn't exist on Mac OS X Server PPC). The author writes:

"It will only update if any of the current files have a modification date older than July 18th. This update has been tested with Mac OS X 10.4.10 on PowerPC and Intel, and Mac OS X Server PowerPC. This update also works on Mac OS X 10.4.9, but if you upgrade to 10.4.10 you will need to reapply the update. I definitely don't expect it to work on 10.4.8 or earlier. This update should be obsoleted by Mac OS X 10.4.11 when it is released."

The application is available as a 33KB download.

Go here for the article and download:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070924114318477

The Knowledge Base article is a bit of an insult to anyone with more than a handful of Macs to administer. Basically if you have two hundred machines they recommend that you manually go around and adjust them twice in the next two weeks. At 5 minutes per machine that is over 33 hours of work.

If the update is so simple (modify three system files with the new rules), why hasn't Apple released it as an update? That way it could be deployed via Remote Desktop and done in a few minutes.

Cheers, Chris W.

Glad you thought it worth my time and effort researching that for you and reproducing it here.

It won't work with your Mac anyway as you are still stuck on 10.4.5.

Hi -

Apologies if I caused you any offence - grumpiness was directed at Apple for providing more work for administrators instead of fixing the problem with a simple update (as they did earlier this year with the DST update). If Microsoft can sort it out (and the new dates went into effect in April), why can't Apple?

BTW: Thanks for reminding me to update my profile!

Cheers, Chris W.

"It just works" - yeah right...

Excellent summary for NZ users here: http://www.welmac.org.nz/nzdst2007.php

Can anyone help out?

My Mac Book Pro (about 7 months old) still says the "old" time and if I try to change the clock manually it asks me to authenticate.

If I do this, it goes la-la and says it is "not responding".

This only happens on the clock page - none of the other system preferences are affected.

Hey Klaus1, you should remove that microchip on your shoulder.