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?

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.

Did anyone else read the title wrong?

[Ghoser777]

I swore it said GoDaddy Boobies Changeover.

Re:My Linux update

[cmcguffin]

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