Comments on: What’s your company doing about Daylight Savings Time?

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:30:01 +0000

Feh, teh Linux servers all need a yum update tzdata. THAT took 10 seconds out of life per server. FC4 is at tzdata-2005i-2

Solaris OTOH requires patching not only the Solris tzdata equivalent but libc.so as well. Bah.

By: santiagon

santiagon — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:21:21 +0000

for my company, i just plan on rebooting all of our servers, thereby syncing them to time.nist.gov, and having the workstations just run a net time \\servername /set /yes to get them switched over. as far as our calendaring goes, meetingmaker has a patch out to fix the governmental calendar game.

By: deviant_

deviant_ — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:11:48 +0000

It's worth reading the entire changelog, or at least skimming it, just to get a sense of how very common this sort of change is.

By: deviant_

deviant_ — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:09:10 +0000

Probably goes without saying (and Brianenigma already hinted at it), but what we’re doing is “yum update tzdata”. That being said:

zarniwoop:~$ rpm -q –changelog tzdata
…
* Tue Sep 06 2005 Jakub Jelinek 2005m-2
– 2005m
– changes for USA (extending DST by 4 weeks since 2007), Tunisia,
Australia, Kazakhstan
– historical timezone data changes for Japan, Poland, Northern Ireland and
Mali
– timezone name change for East Timor
…

By: ext_22310

ext_22310 — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:16:47 +0000

I’m thinking it’s really unlikely that most IT departments are going to be ready.

For example, some versions of Lotus Notes/Domino have three different sources of time zone information: (1) the OS time zone settings, (2) an internal table of time zones, and (3) a third table of time zones embedded in the Java runtime which is embedded inside Notes/Domino. There are probably a lot of companies who aren’t going to be willing to deploy Notes 7.0.2 just to get the fixes, in which case they’re going to need to apply patches in all 3 locations and check configurations manually. And there’s no way to reconfigure Notes 6 on the Mac to get the new DST right…

Every time we go through this crap I move closer to just setting all my clocks and watches to UTC and saying I’m done with this time zone nonsense.

By: scromp

scromp — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:24:29 +0000

This has been kind of a nightmare for us, thanks government! We have a whole slew of patches that have had to be applied and tested to all kinds of middleware in various environments (starting in development and going allllllll the way up to production.) We’re not quite done with that last bit yet, and each time we do a patchset we find some new thing that breaks – not really ever because of the new rules, but just as a side hazard of doing sweeping updates.

I don’t actually think we’ve bothered to test the time change itself at all yet.

Anyway, yeah.

By: fweebles

fweebles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:53:30 +0000

Glad to be of service. :D

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:40:10 +0000

That’s the page that got me thinking about it!

By: fweebles

fweebles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:14:19 +0000

Having a bit of a fit about it, I'm afraid. :)

By: tuliphead

tuliphead — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:32:23 +0000

Actually, Juniper published a number of technical bulletins on the subject (proactive notices emailed to subscribed customers) for a variety of our products, detailing how the software would deal with the change. I hadn’t even thought about it until I worked on those bulletins, but I was impressed that they were handling this issue already…