Daylight Savings Time "mini-Y2K"?

[Dr Mordrid]

Article....

Earlier date for springing forward may lead to ‘mini Y2K’

By Rowena Vergara
ROCKFORD REGISTER STAR

It’s been compared to a “mini Y2K” — some electronic devices will be confused by the new date for daylight-saving time.

Although it’s more of a nuisance than a catastrophe in the making, older computers, PDAs and DVRs may not automatically update their times when daylight-saving comes three weeks early this year — on March 11.

The date change was established by the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was passed to get Americans to cut energy consumption. The thinking is that less energy will be used toward the end of the day if the sun’s out later.

For years, most of the nation has set clocks ahead on the first Sunday of April.

Few computer experts think the new date will make a big difference.

“It’s been the set way for a long time now. And all the computers and devices had it programmed in so they were already set for it. It knew that. It just happened and it was a very seamless change,” said Larry Glusman, a computer consultant and owner of Computer Resources in Rockford.

Consumers can prepare for the change by using a rule of thumb: If a computer or device is a bit older, it may not correct the time automatically.

Any Microsoft operating system older than Windows XP may not recognize the new time change come March 11, says Jeffrey Garcea, a computer consultant and owner of Garcea Computers in 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 and Windows 95.

For more information, customers can visit;

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

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[MultimediaMan]

Actually it's a very big deal: Any environment which runs Exchange 11 or older needs to make sure their Exchange servers are patched to the latest service pack and have the DST patch in place. All Outlook Clients must be Patched as well. If not, you are courting serious end-user headaches regarding the Calendar.

We can thank Vista and Office 2007 for raising the red flag for us. We were testing them together early this year and noticed that all of the Appointments and Calendar events were getting resent to everybody who logged into the the test machines. We asked Microsoft about it and they responded as to why this was so - Vista is already DST 2007 aware. We then told them that we needed a solution for this issue for Windows XP and Exchange 11, otherwise there would be literally millions of Appointment and Calendar requests messages flooding the servers and the network. After some foot-stomping, Microsoft delivered a solution for this, but the requirements for a smooth transition are high: you have to get all of your clients patched up before you can apply the fix to the Exchange mailboxes.

We have been working day and night to make sure we are patched; we are on track so far.

Since Timezones are actually being added, this is not a US-only change; clients in other countries which share Exchange must also be made aware of the new time zones. A similar thing occured last year when Sri Lanka Changed it's timezone; Microsoft issued a patch which added the new timezone.

SMTP mail servers which use Anti-spam tools will have to be patched and the heuristics tweaked or run the risk of having messages with incorrect timestamps flagged as spam.

As far as Windows 9x and Windows NT, Microsoft has a way to manually add the required timezones; no reboot should be required for this to take effect.

Anti-virus companies have to do some work in some cases as well.

This is not so much a problem in Windows Vista/ Exchange 12 as they use UTC for all appointments instead of the hardcoded local Timezone.

Unix is not free of these issues, especially Databases running MySQL, or Informix. Failure to patch these applications can have serious repercussions. The DST Patches for Linux and Unix will generally require a Reboot.

Other Software which must be patched/ updated; Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, Java Runtime Environment, any Jscript applets which reference system time directly will have to be looked at and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Cell phones and Cellular networks are likely going to see some issues. Text messaging will likely be the first/hardest-hit area of disruption.

99% of the alarm clocks on the shelves today are not DST 2007 compliant; make sure to get a Net-aware clock or watch which can sync with a local Cell tower or other broadcast NTP Source.

This is not a "mini Y2K"; this is a Y2K-type scenario. Fortunately, the Y2K playbook applies.

[agallag]

Java has been by far the biggest headache for us. When you've got over 2000 servers in the environment, it's hard to find all the rogue Java installs, and even harder to find out which are in use. We ended up pushing out the latest versions of JRE 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 to all the servers, and we're letting each application support group figure it out for themselves... big mess.

[Chucky Cheese]

...i just updated our TMS lan pcs(..all are NT 4 w/sp6a) with a piece of software from MS...it was called TZedit...i had to redifine the Eastern time zone definitions on over 50 pcs'

cc

[MultimediaMan]

TZEdit is used to change the Actual Month and Day of Daylight Time; it doesn't help with the adding of actual Timezones. You'll have to add those entries into the Registry via script or manually. The Registry file for adding them is huge.

To Check Timezone from the Command Line (WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Win2K3);

C:\>w32tm -tz

To change the Timezone from the Command Line (WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Win2K3);

C:\>control.exe TIMEDATE.CPL,,/Z Desired Time Zone

Where Desired Time zone is the exact name of the Time zone entry - without quotation marks, case sensitive.

Example:

C:\>control.exe TIMEDATE.CPL,,/Z Central Standard Time (Mexico)

To Force a resync with an NTP Server;

Windows NT/2000;

C:\>w32tm -once

Windows XP/2003;

C:\>w32tm /resync

We have been setting up FTP directories on our DHCP Servers which have a text file in them with the Local Timezone information for that DHCP Server's various scopes. Thus, we are able to script a check to insure the local PC has the correct timezone options available, check to make sure is in the correct Timezone, change the timezone if necessary, and force an NTP Time refresh.