[jcifs] Finding the server's time zone

[Michael B Allen]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 7:21 AM, jcifs-user <jcifs-user at mailinator.com> wrote:
>
> Hello, I've just started using jCIFS and so far it's great. However, I've run
> into a bit of a problem; I need to find the time zone of the samba server to
> which I'm connecting. At first, I thought of perhaps creating a new
> temporary file on the server via SmbFile.createNewFile() and checking it's
> createTime() or lastModified(), however, these seemed to return the time
> relative to my computer (as opposed to the server's).
> I know that while connecting to the server it does send it's timezone, but I
> can't seem to figure out how to access it (it's part of the ServerInfo of
> the SmbTransport, but there's no public way of accessing it, AFAIK).

There's actually a field in the SMB_COM_NEGOTIATE_RESPONSE called
ServerTimeZone that indicates the TZ in minutes relative to UTC. JCIFS
does not have a method to retrieve that value but you could easily add
one to SmbFile like:

  public int getTimeZone() throws SmbException
  {
      connect0();
      return tree.session.transport.server.serverTimeZone;
  }

You could then use this with any SMB URL. IPC$ is probably good
because every server has one:

  SmbFile f = new SmbFile("smb://server.example.com/IPC$");
  int tzMinutes = f.getTimeZone();

You could also extend SmbFile without actually modifying the JCIFS
package but the package would have to be the jcifs.smb namespace to
access the package protected stuff and the solution could of course
break at any time.

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
Java Active Directory Integration
http://www.ioplex.com/