HourGlass for Linux

WhatIsHG?What is HourGlass for Linux?

HourGlassTM is a date and time simulation tool. With HourGlass installed on your system, each user ID, program, or even an entire application can have its own “private clock” telling it what date and time it is.

Without disrupting other operations on the machine, you can set the date back for your particular login session to, for example, the last day of the last fiscal period in order to re-run certain financial reports.

You can also define permanent data or time offsets for particular logons or particular programs or sets of programs. If you have a group of users who log in from a different timezone and want to see their local time on transactions, that’s easy to do with HourGlass.

It’s even possible to specify that a specific program should always see the same fixed date and/or time every time it is run.

Software developers know that date or time specific program bugs are the worst sort because every user will run into them at the same moment, even if they run on different computers. HourGlass makes it easy for developers to test your critical applications and systems for date or time specific issues such as calendar rollovers, leap years, end of week/month/year/period computations, etc.

Uses include:

  • Re-running old (or future) month- or year-end jobs
  • Testing date and time sensitive applications
  • Regression testing
  • Cross-timezone consolidation of applications which are not timezone-aware

HourGlass supports all Linux languages and databases. Installation is simple, and requires only a single re-boot.

Features of HourGlass

  • Any user can change his own date/time without affecting other users. When a user changes the date/time for his shell, all programs he runs will also get an altered date/time until he changes the date/time back.
  • Date/times can be changed interactively, or the sysadmin can define rules that specify which users and/or applications will get modified date/times and how the date/time will be modified.
  • The altered date/time can be:
      • Absolute Constant Time
        (e.g., always return 2001-01-13 @ 12:12)
      • Constant Offset Time
        (e.g., today plus 10 years)
      • Relative Constant Time
        (e.g. start at 2001-01-13 @ 12:12, and progress normally)
  • Not affected by XNTP or other network time synchronization daemons.
  • Application/Job usage of date/time routines can be logged. For examples, see logexample.html. This provides the ability to determine which applications are using various date/time routines. Logging does not require using altered dates/times.

 

Downloads

HourGlass is also available for MPE/iX and HP-UX.

For more information please fill out our contact form.

“HourGlass” is a registered trademark of Princeton Softech, Inc.