Preparing Your Datacenters for DST Changes?

Cheeze asks: "As I am sure some of you know, Daylight Saving Time is slated to change this year thanks to The Energy Policy Act of 2005. This means nothing to the large majority of the population except they will either sleep late one day or have to commute in the dark. To a select few, this is a crunch time akin to the Y2K fiasco, only there has been almost zero publicity recently. These select few are the ones responsible for updating the millions of computers, both servers and workstations, with the new time zone information. For newer servers, this usually means just install a patch and reboot (which is slightly more than mildly inconvenient). For older servers, this is basically an 'End of Life' declaration. Servers running software for which no patch is available will be unable to update their own clocks. This doesn't seem like such a big deal until you realize Microsoft is only offering patches for Windows XP and beyond, and Sun will not be supporting Solaris 7 and older. That should knock a large percentage of the computers 1 hour off for a few weeks this spring. What are you doing in your datacenters to prepare?"

Comments

Avoid the problem in the US

[ziegast]

In the US, move your servers to Arizona or eastern Indiana or Hawaii or Alaska, so you don't have to deal with time zone changes anymore.

-ez

I'm more concerned of a switch back to the old....

[Antony-Kyre]

I'm more concerning of a switch back to the old DST (the one we had in 2006) if they decide it's the energy saving isn't good enough. How difficult would it be to unpatch out systems?

Dammit

[Timesprout]

I just got my servers switched over from the Julien to the Gregorian calender. Now this. When will it ever end.

BC to AD

[camperdave]

You should have been around for the BC to AD conversion.

We thought we were going to be fine with that here, as we had some wise men who worked out when they were going to start. We were planning on just using an integer for number of years:positive for AD, negative for BC. However, some idiot politician somewhere decided to start labelling the years at 1 instead of 0, so now we've got an out-by-one bug every time you try to do a calculation that crosses the AD/BC boundary.