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."

Comments

Screw 'em

[chill]

Manually adjust the clock. Just write a small script to take care of it for logins or as a scheduled task for servers.

Re:Screw 'em

[iPaul]

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.

Re:Screw 'em

[Anml4ixoye]

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.

Re:Screw 'em

[IWannaBeAnAC]

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.

Re:Screw 'em

[dotfile]

Umm, that's not really the problem. It doesn't matter what the hardware clock is set for, UTC or local time. In any sane installation you're only going to use the hardware clock until you sync with the NTP servers anyway. The local time is still going to change on a different date than the OS is configured for. If you have Linux or UNIX boxes and keep the hardware clock set for UTC, you're STILL going to need to fix the time zone setings for the correct DST changeover dates, otherwise all local times will be off by an hour between the new changeover date and the old one. It's not a clock thing, it a time zone thing. We're having to apply patches to every single box in our infrastructure -- that's around 15,000 systems, not including desktops. Those add another 100K or more. We've had to patch Slowaris, Linux, HPUX, AIX, and a few flavors of Windoze, and that's just the servers. Then there are patches required for Java and a host of other crap, don't ask me why they don't just use the damn system clock.

The issue here is not the DST patch, it's the fact that Micro$loth was charging $40K for the Windoze 2000 patch. They justified it because W2K is officially out of support for patches - it's EOL or EOSL, I don't remember which becuase I pay very little attention to Windoze server issues.

free patches are available

[ceresur]

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

Re:free patches are available

[jayhawk88]

Microsoft themselves also offer a free solution for Windows 2000 servers. Perhaps this takes a bit more work than an official patch would, but if you've got so many 2000 servers that you'd consider dropping $4k on a patch, chances are you've got Active Directory or at least an admin with the skills to script a rollout of a reg file with this fix.

Really inaccurate story.

[pythas]

It's not $4000 per product, it's $4000 for ALL the products

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/unoffici al-windows-2000-daylight.html)

Yay for overblown stories!

Re:Whoa

[Just Some Guy]

The real question: Do you like George Bush [...] Or do you hate Bush [...]?

No, the real, real question is: why are you so desperate to drag political bullshit into every story? Love him or hate him, GWB has absolutely nothing to do with how much Microsoft charges for a patch.

innovation

[Epiphenomenon]

I for one think that $4000 for innovation like this is a small price to pay.

Down with DST!

[astrosmash]

That was one expensive piece of pointless legislation.

I've always felt that if we could harness all of the time and energy software developers and IT departments have spent over the years working on DST-related issues in software and apply it to some other purpose of good, we'd all be driving around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon by now. It is 2007, after all. You know, the future?

That's right. I'm blaming the state of the world on DST.

there are free utils to patch this

[jjeffries]

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".

Re:things that make you go hmmm...

[Dutch Gun]

It's a little different. You're comparing a fix for a defective product to a patch to change behavior to fit an unforseeable change in timekeeping logic. And, please note that these products aren't even officially being supported anymore (thus, the service charge).

I'm not trying to defend MS, but there's no need to make dodgy comparisons... One can surmise that open-source users will likely have an easier time making this change, seeing as they don't have to rely on a corporation to update their binaries.

Exactly

[Philip K Dickhead]

This is for OS that are out of support.

If you bought an extended support contract, at the time of expiration, you get this for free.

If you thought "I won't have any W2K in 6 months, so why bother" and 24 months later, the DST issue caught you - well, pay up.

Or what value did those who paid for extended support get?

Re:Go Linux!

[kernelpanicked]

You would be wrong. If you check the last few updates fedora-legacy made to RedHat 7.2 and 7.3's glibc, the fix is already there. I work for a web host, where there are still quite a few of these old machines left kicking so yes I had to verify this.

Relatively Inexpesive

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

This fee is all inclusive. That means any product in extended support, and any DST related patch.

So that includes:
    Windows 2000 Server straight DST patch
    Windows 2000 CRT DST patch (Never heard of that one? See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932955/en-us/ and here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932590/en-us/
    Exchange running on W2K
    Visual Studio 6.0 patches (I believe...)

So $4000 to cover *all* unsupported systems, and to have a human to call and say "Your patch screwed up my server" and have them fix it, is to be cliche, Priceless

Re:things that make you go hmmm...

[kbielefe]

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.

Re:Bastages.

[OmnipotentEntity]

$4K? How about this?

Open up regedit and go to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\TimeZoneInformation

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.