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

Where to get time zone info source files from

[Anonymous Coward]

This should fix the problems for your Unix based machines. You can download a set of time zone source files from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/, these files are in the public domain. From these files you can build a full set of zoneinfo files (read the man page for zic(1)), DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR CURRENT ONES IN CASE OF PROBLEMS!! For most Linux based distros this is in a package called tzdata (which will compile the source files into zoneinfo files for you). zic(1) should put the compiled files into the right directory for you. These source files should work with most zic(1)'s, if not you may need to massage them with sed or perl. Don't forget to update /etc/localtime (or whatever other mechanism your OS uses, /etc/timezone et al) to set your localtime to the right zoneinfo file.

Not quite true...

[oDDmON oUT]

"...Microsoft is only offering patches for Windows XP and beyond"

They are offering support for Windows 2000, free with the right volume license, $$$ without, or they have made a manual registry hack available (which I don't have handy because I'm posting from home).

And before you ask, there are companies that still specify Win2K server and workstation to run their software, Thompson/Prometric being one of them, which is how I came to find this out.