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Preparing Your Datacenters for DST Changes?

Posted by Cliff on from the all-this-trouble-for-such-a-foolish-change dept.

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?"

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. What are you doing in your datacenters to prepare? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Using UTC.

  2. Servers should be on UTC anyway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is no reason for having a single server clock on non-UTC. DST, even if it was to stay the same forever, makes things a pain in the arse (once a year, an hour happens twice).

    Your client should convert the timezone. For a client machine, it's not much hassle just to go into clock settings and change it.

    Worst case is web-apps - the server clock should be UTC, but you still need to convert the time zone in the client-facing PHP/Perl/Java/etc code. There you're just looking at a patch to the language runtime or whatever.

  3. Re:Avoid the problem in the US by _mythdraug_ · · Score: 3, Informative

    All of Indiana will honor DST this year. (Yet another change to have to be prepared for)