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GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover?
Several readers alerted us to this piece in PC World reporting on concerns that GoDaddy might not be ready for the DST changeover. Some readers, and others, claimed that GoDaddy's servers are not reachable now and are not serving email or web sites; but others see no evidence of this. The article recounts the rather flip response one GoDaddy customer got from their tech support: "As Daylight Savings [sic] does not apply to our servers, since we are on Arizona Time and our time zone does not change, our servers wouldn't update." When IDG News Service contacted GoDaddy they got an altogether more sensible reply.
For international services like domain registrars, switch to UTC already. Running the server on a local timezone will only lead to confusion.
All my internet servers just use UTC. NTP synchronized, naturally.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I dont understand, all that godaddy does is manage dns, web servers for parking space and basic MX services. How can someone fuck up with this kind of setup? Even if DST patches are off the only problem that i see is with
1. DNS TTLs being incorrect.
2. Your mail showing incorrect time
3. Web server logs (who analyzes these anyway) showing an incorrect time.
How can any or all of these bring down a site. WTF?
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
The real question is, is the problem DST related, or is it a coincidence?
;-)
Sure, it happened around the day of the change. Sure, they were pretty flip about responding to peoples' questions about their DST change readyness. But is it fair to jump to the conclusion that it [the outage] is because of the new DST rules? It could be that they are incompetent in other ways.
--Xandu
Remember IntellAdmin, offering a free DST patch for Windows 2000? Well, it doesn't work. I installed it on a Win2K system, and the time didn't change to DST. I contacted Intelladmin, and got "workaround instructions" (open clock, change to another time zone, change back, then reset the clock to the correct time.). It only changes to DST the next time you manually set the clock.
So if you deployed this "patch" on your Win2K machines in a corporate environment, the time is going to be wrong when everybody shows up on Monday.
I can confirm that they were down, but it looks like they might be coming back up. Some of my hosts are responding now.
For a bit, the GoDaddy support site mentions "technical difficulty". Godaddy.com
The Internet Storm Center has notes, too: SANS Internet Storm Center
Here is how I updated a Linux machine (Debian Woody) for Eastern
:) /etc/localtime /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern, /root/dst2007 /root/dst2007 /usr/share /root/dst2007/zoneinfo/ . /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime /etc/localtime | grep 2007
time, if anyone is interested. Some of the information I found on
thar Intraweb was, well, sloppy, and it took some trial-and-error.
The following was exactly what I typed, and it "took" correctly
this morning, with a nice 1-hour gap in the Apache log at 2am. I
don't know if this is the best way, but it worked.
su -
# root password, of course
ls -l
# (mine said:
# in case we have to reverse the procedure below)
mkdir
cd
wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
tar -xzf tzdata2007c.tar.gz
zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
cd
mv zoneinfo zoneinfo.old
mv
ln -sf
zdump -v
# (should include Mar 11 in listing)
I live in Arizona.
/etc/environment...A field that doesn't exist if you're MST-7 w/o DST.
:)
I'm a Unix admin for one of the largest ISPs in the state. We're an AIX house.
I can't speak for our Windows bretheren, but our AIX boxes required absolutely no patching. Our servers calibrate against a UTC source, and the patch IBM offers only affects the optional right-hand portion of $TZ in
GoDaddy's response is entirely sensible.
The only thing not "sensible" here is that you have a bunch of clowns in Congress making decisions with ramifications far beyond their ability to even wrap their brain around.
By the way, our trains run just fine without DST.
I swore it said GoDaddy Boobies Changeover.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
GP is correct, actually. Suppose a user schedules an event for 9 am local time. The server re-maps this to UTC, then stores the UTC time. Then, government comes along and changes the mapping between local time and UTC by rescheduling the start of DST. Now, when the server maps back from UTC, the event ends up as 8 am local time. This is probably not what the user wanted.
you're an idiot.Thus, you're actually better off storing everything in UTC, because then you know what time everything really took place / will take place, in any timezone you care to know it in.
Whether it's done in UTC or local time zones, having local decisions made based on the local time can be problematic when hardware, firmware, and software manufactures don't provide updates.
The DST has changed. I am now taking inventory of hardware that didn't properly make the change. I don't count things like the digital clock in my car, because it doesn't support DST in any way.
Items that have failed and support DST and still failed include my wall Atomic Clocks, and my Linksys Router with the latest (Feb 2007) firmware updated. The manufactures website on both of these items makes absolutely no mention of the DST change as if nothing happened.
I have work-arounds for both failures. It involves turning off the broken DST and changing the time zone one zone to the East. The Linksys router is a non-issue for most folks, but I use the clock for access restrictions, otherwise the school age kid requires lots of prodding to get offline and go to bed. Having his access shutdown eliminates lots of nagging.
Why can't Linksys even admit the issue and state on the website the latest firmware update did not address the issue? I should not have to check to see if the software is working properly. I think I will submit a bug report and see what happens.
The truth shall set you free!
This morning, March 11, some of our Go Daddy services came under significant and sustained distributed denial of service attacks resulting in intermittent disruptions of various services, including shared hosting and email.
Our Internet Security and Network teams immediately invoked counter-measures to respond to these large scale, sophisticated attacks.
After 4-5 hours of intermittent disruptions of various services this morning, including shared hosting and email, the attack was contained.
Our Internet Security and Network teams will continue to analyze and assess the nature of today's attacks and their characteristics to identify additional defense mechanisms that can be used in the ongoing efforts of Internet Security.
Go Daddy has made and will be continuing to make significant investments in our information security infrastructure to protect from these shifting types of attacks.
This in no way related to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, as some have speculated. With regard to DST, Go Daddy has been engaged in preparation and patching and worked closely with our vendors for some time leading up to the DST change. leading up to the DST change.
Neil Warner
Chief Information Security Officer
The Go Daddy Group, Inc.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Maybe you live somewhere that your clock ended up locking into CHU, the atomic clock in Canada...
I've never seen a clock that synced from CHU (3.33 MHz and 7.335 MHz)...or from WWV/WWVH (2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz), for that matter.
The clocks and watches that feature "atomic time" use the signals from WWVB on 60 KHz.
--
73 de Maggie K3XS
Editor, Phil-Mont Mobile Radio Club Blurb - http://www.phil-mont.org/
Elecraft K2 #1641 -- AOPA 925383 -- ARRL 39280
-=Maggie Leber=-
My atomic clocked changed just fine. Also, I was always under the impression that the DST function wasn't built into the clock itself, but into the data stream coming from WWV or WWVH (depending on your location.)
The clock manufactures have the option of either reading the DST bit, or using an internal table. Many manufactures have opted for the internal table, especialy those marketing to non-USA markets such as South America. My SkyScan clock did not update. I even forced a reset to see if it didn't catch the update. It still has no idea it's daylight savings time. I switched DST off so it does not become wrong in April and moved timezones one to the East. My clock uses an internal table and does not use the DST bit. It is not mentioned in any of the clock specifications.
The truth shall set you free!