Impact of Permanent Time Zone / DST Changes on CA Identity Manager

Products

• CA Identity Manager
• CA Identity Suite

Issue/Introduction

Organizations located in regions shifting to permanent Daylight Saving Time (DST) or making permanent time zone changes (e.g., British Columbia) need to determine if Identity Manager (IDM) requires manual configuration changes to support the new time-zone rules.

Environment

• Product: Identity Manager (all versions)
• Operating System: Any supported OS (e.g., Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server)
• Middleware: IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, Oracle WebLogic
• Java: Any supported JDK/JRE

Cause

Identity Manager does not maintain its own independent time-zone database. Instead, the application inherits time-zone rules and daylight saving time transitions directly from two sources:

1. The Operating System (OS) system clock and time-zone configuration.
2. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) time-zone data (tzdata).

When a government changes time-zone laws, the application will not recognize the change until the underlying OS and Java environments are patched with updated time-zone data.

Resolution

To ensure Identity Manager correctly reflects permanent DST or time-zone changes, infrastructure-level updates are required. No changes are typically needed within the IDM User Console or Management Console.

1. Update the Operating System

Patch the server operating system with the latest time-zone data package. For Linux systems, this is typically the tzdata package.

• Example (RHEL): Ensure the tzdata package is at a version that includes the specific regional change (e.g., tzdata-2026b for the British Columbia permanent DST update).

2. Update the Java Environment (JDK/JRE)

The JVM maintains its own internal copy of time-zone rules. Even if the OS is patched, the JVM must also be updated.

• For IBM WebSphere/JDK: Use the IBM Time Zone Update Tool for Java (JTZU) to update the JDK used by the application server.
• For Oracle/OpenJDK: Use the tzupdater tool or upgrade to a JDK update level that includes the required tzdata version.

3. Restart Application Services

Time-zone changes are loaded into memory when the Java process starts. Therefore, a full restart of the application server (WebSphere, Tomcat, etc.) is mandatory after patching the OS or JVM.