As some of you people know, we (as in the University) recently purchased some Thin Clients in order to replace some oldish’ computers and solve the software management at the same time.
The Thin Clients ain’t bad, they are Wyse V90L‘s and they (as in Wyse) use their own management software to manage and deploy those thin clients and software. The bad thing about that, is it’s using it’s own “Scripting Language” (if you can call it that way – it’s more pseudo scripting since you can’t do much with it besides some basic actions).
The Wyse Device Manager also introduces it’s own limitations. Up till now our DHCP had server options for thin clients in some other facility and thus was sending those to *all* subnets it’s acting on, thus overwriting (or disabling ?) the DHCP ACK send out by the WDM. But that’s only one.
The second one is that the WDM seems to use (or expect) the American date format internally. But how did I stumble upon that ? As you know, I’m living and working in Germany and we use a different time/date format than the American’s. Now, lets assume you want to deploy packages to you Thin Clients when no one’s using them anymore (like say – around midnight), you drag your package upon the devices and select “Specific Date/Time“. Now if you have the German date/time format, the WDM will simply tell you, “Deployment date can’t be less than the current system time.”
Initially I was like *WTF*, didn’t I just enter a time in the future (~15 minutes in the future from where we at right now) ?
First I looked through their Knowledgebase, but as nothing was documented there, I called their Support Hotline, where I briefly told ’em what was going on and he immediately told me, that’d I was hitting that error, since the WDM *is* using _and_ expecting the American time/date format internally. But he told me that they’ll hopefully fix that with the next release since they get asked that quite often.