Re: ** Multiple dates/one machine **

h
Hello Ian,

You wrote:
>Is there any easy way i can set different dates/times for
>different users/grps/etc?

**IF** the application uses job dates rather than system dates you may be
able to do this by setting QDATE and QTIME to GMT, then create a routing
program for each subsystem that looks up a table to determine their time
zone offset and set the job date and time accordingly.

Potential problems:
        o Job date doesn't roll at midnight
        o Programs that access QDATE or QTIME directly
        o Programs that use date and time APIs
        o Programs that use SQL DATE, TIME, and TIMESTAMP functions

There were various vendor products for Y2K remediation that allowed
different jobs to run with different timezones by intercepting the system
date calls.  Some of those may still be available.

Another possible solution is LPAR.  That would satisfy the requirement for a
single system but you must have a partitionable system.  You must also
install the software into both partitions which probably means two licences.
Each partition is effectively a separate system so they could have different
date and time settings.

This is one thing that Unix does much better than the 400.  The system clock
is on GMT and each process can have a timezone offset attribute.  Rochester
should do something similar with the AS/400.  Oh wait, they have.  The
QUTCOFFSET system value, but they stuffed it up by using local time as the
base and they didn't allow job description or user profile overrides to
QUTCOFFSET.  Historical decisions made on the S/38 (and possibly earlier)
reach out from the past to bite us on the bum again!  Nautical almanacs
sorted this problem out centuries ago.  Yet again IT suffers from the NIH
syndrome!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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