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Microsoft Charging Businesses $4K for DST Fix
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft has slashed the price it's going to charge users on the daylight saving time fixes. As you know, the federal law that moves the date for DST goes into effect this month. Although the price of $4000 is 1/10 of the original estimate Microsoft made, it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for. From the article: 'Among the titles in that extended support category are Windows 2000, Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook 2000, the e-mail and calendar client included with Office 2000. For users running that software, Microsoft charges $4,000 per product for DST fixes. For that amount, customers can apply the patches to all systems in their organizations, including branch offices and affiliate.' The only thing they can't do, said a Microsoft rep, is redistribute them."
We are using this patch at my organization for all our Win2k and Win2k Server boxes out there (running legacy apps that we don't need to upgrade). http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/unofficia l-windows-2000-daylight.html
It's not $4000 per product, it's $4000 for ALL the products
i al-windows-2000-daylight.html)
They also provide a variety of workarounds (registry files you can apply, and scripts to apply to a large number of machines remotely) for Windows 2000. If you don't like that, there's unofficial patches as well (http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/unoffic
Yay for overblown stories!
Kerberos auth has problems if the clocks are > 300 sec out of sync. It's not that you couldn't do it manually, you just run the risk of a "hickup", like no one in the domain is allowed to log in.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Hahaha.
As an engineer who is right in the middle of helping our customers make the changes necessary for the DST fix, it is much more complicated than that.
First, you have all of the servers and clients which rely on one another. The biggest effect is on mail - Exchange/Outlook/OWA.
Second, you have to do it in the right order, at about the same time. If you update the server, then clients who schedule appointments will be off until they update.
Third, you've got software which calculates various things based on that date. Think financial transactions, etc.
I've blogged about the tool we have to help customers figure out what has to be done.
I wish it was as easy as just updating a script, but when you have to coordinate that change across 10s or 100s of thousands of servers, clients, etc, it's not an easy task.
And let's not forget Microsoft isn't the only one having to make changes. Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Blackberries - they all have changes that have to be made. I'll personally be glad when this is all done. Ugh.
Random Musings
There's a free patcher here that I've used on a few 2k machines and one NT4 machine and nothing has blown up thus far.
First link under "freeware downloads".
Its basically a Microsoft WTF. While every sane operating system keeps the hardware clock on universal time (UTC/GMT), Windows keeps the hardware clock on local time. This affects things like the date format stored on disk in the filesystem.
Talk about tinfoil hats, how paranoid do you have to be to tie a daylight savings change to the Iraq war?
The daylight savings time change is one tiny paragraph of a huge energy policy bill, and by the way provides for a study in 9 months to see if it actually helped, and a potential of reverting back to the 2005 schedule if it didn't help. You may not agree with the policies put forth in the bill, but it certainly wasn't prompted by a desire to avoid appropriating money --- my senators and representative (all republicans) voted against it for anti-pork reasons.
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$4K? How about this?
o l\TimeZoneInformation
Open up regedit and go to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr
Change DaylightStart to the following
00 00 03 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
(Simply we're changing 04 to 03 and 01 to 02)
Change StandardStart to the following
00 00 0b 00 01 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
(Simply we're changing 0a to 0b and 05 to 01)
Why those changes?
DaylightStart rules:
04 becomes 03 because we're going from "April" (04) to "March" (03). 01 becomes 02 because we're going from the 1st Sunday (in April) to the 2nd Sunday (in March).
StandardStart rules:
0a becomes 0b because we're going from "October" (0a) to "November" (0b). 05 becomes 01 because we're going from the Last Sunday (in October) to the 1st Sunday (in November).
Consider that one on the house. It works for Windows 2000 at least.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."