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.

Comments

Timezones

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Timezones

[Scott Wunsch]

Actually, you have that backwards. POSIX timezone definitions (the things you find in /usr/share/zoneinfo on Linux) describe how DST works in all different years. If you convert a UTC timestamp in March 2005 to your local timezone, it won't use DST, but if you do it for a UTC timestamp in March 2007, it'll know that then it needs to use DST. 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.

if there is a possibility for a screwup ...

[sarathmenon]

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?

Re:if there is a possibility for a screwup ...

[tomstdenis]

Well you see.... *points to elephant in corner* ====> who me?

Tom

Re:if there is a possibility for a screwup ...

[brokencomputer]

I called GoDaddy and they told me "we're having network issues. We've been having them for a while. I don't know when they'll be fixed but they should be soon." My site is now resolving ( http://wrongplanet.net/ ) but it wasn't resolving when i called. He didn't say anything about daylight savings time and some of my other domains with godaddy had no problems.

DST?

[Xandu]

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. ;-)

IntellAdmin blew it with their DST fix

[Animats]

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.

My Linux update

[ortholattice]

Here is how I updated a Linux machine (Debian Woody) for Eastern
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 /etc/localtime
    # (mine said:  /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern,
    # in case we have to reverse the procedure below)
  mkdir /root/dst2007
  cd /root/dst2007
  wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
  tar -xzf tzdata2007c.tar.gz
  zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
  cd /usr/share
  mv zoneinfo zoneinfo.old
  mv /root/dst2007/zoneinfo/ .
  ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime
  zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
     # (should include Mar 11 in listing)

Re:My Linux update

[cmcguffin]

And to think that some people claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop! ;)

Did anyone else read the title wrong?

[Ghoser777]

I swore it said GoDaddy Boobies Changeover.

Re:Timezones & embedded firmware

[Technician]

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.