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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?"

4 of 114 comments (clear)

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

    Using UTC.

  2. Avoid the problem in the US by ziegast · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  3. Dammit by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  4. Re:What are you doing in your datacenters to prepa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mod parent up. ISTM that you're better off if all computers have their hardware clocks set to UTC and the conversions to local time take place at the last possible time in the clients (if at all). If a user wants to use some client software or OS that doesn't understand the silly daylight savings rules (which are extremely crazy in some places); at least they don't damage anything in the datacenter and will only confuse themselves.

    OTOH, what kind of evil company won't even give as trivial a patch as updating a time-zone file to their customers!?! If I had any such software and the company still existed I'd be wanting a full refund.