Daylight-Saving Time a Mini-Y2K?
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By Brian Neill, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.  Mar. 9--MANATEE -- As people get ready to set their clocks ahead one hour  this Sunday, local companies were scrambling this week to make sure computers  and servers remember to do the same.   Under a new U.S.
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(InfoWorld) - Timed stock market trades will go awry. Manufacturing lines will grind to a halt. Perplexed executives will hold court before empty conference rooms. These are just a few of the doomsday scenarios that have been tossed out in advance of Daylight Savings Time, which has been bumped up by two weeks this year by order of the U.S. Congress.  The warnings recall the Year 2000, or Y2K, hysteria that reigned at the turn of the Millennium, when some worried that the computer systems that were programmed to recognize two digit years and that were used to run just about everything would suddenly stop working. But executives and enterprise IT professionals contacted by InfoWorld say that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) change, while a nuisance, is no Y2K, and they expect few disruptions to their businesses come Monday. The new, accelerated time change is the result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which lengthened Daylight Savings Time in an effort to curb U.S. fuel consumption. IT vendors and industry groups recognized the potential for confusion, with many operating systems and applications programmed to use the old Daylight Savings Time date, and started warning about potential disruptions from DST just after the New Year. In a February alert to its members, the IT ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) said that the new Daylight Savings Time could "affect all consumers from home users to large enterprises," with problems ranging from missed appointments to system failures where correct time stamps are needed to store, monitor, or operate critical infrastructures. IT-ISAC members were encouraged to identify any systems that were time dependent and request patches for affected systems. Large platform vendors like Microsoft have also been sounding the alarm on DST in recent months, especially about the impact of the change on older versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. Windows Vista and Office 2007, released in January, are programmed to use the new DST schedule. "We've heard a wide spectrum of comments from customers," said M3 Sweatt, chief of staff for the Windows Core Operating System Development Group. Some companies have been working on the problem since last November, when Microsoft first issued patches for Windows to address the time change. However, other firms have waited until just recently to tackle the DST change, he said. "Some companies look at this as an extraordinary situation, whereas some have just incorporated it into their regular maintenance windows," he said.  One of the companies treating it as an extraordinary event is Microsoft, where administrators designated a whole weekend to roll out DST patches across the company's infrastructure, he said. More recently, Microsoft set up a Web site for customers with information on the implications of the time change and links to product patches and other advice for consumers, as well as IT professionals. Despite two years of lead time, however, the Daylight Savings Time issue only made it onto the radar at many enterprises in the last week or so, after the press began covering the issue more closely, said Patrick Foxhoven, CIO of CentraComm Communications, a managed security services provider in Findlay, Ohio. "The biggest headache has just been clients contacting us who are concerned because of all the hype," he said. Centracomm said that it was initially concerned about the impact of the daylight savings time change on security event correlation tools that it uses, but has since then received patches from the necessary vendors, as well as infrastructure vendors it depends on like Juniper Networks. Centracomm is ready to go for the DST change, as are the systems it manages for its customers, he said. But over at Ce De Candy, in Union, N.J., Daylight Savings Time may result in the burning of some midnight oil before Sunday, said IT manager Rick DePinto. "It's a big pain in the neck," said DePinto, who said changes to the company's payroll system and a matrix of Microsoft patches still need to be implemented. Ce De pays its workers hourly and bases the time worked on a time clock system that takes the information from the clocks and uploads the data to the program on a PC, which in turn uploads it to the ERP system on the back end. "All of these time-related payroll issues have to adjust when daylight savings goes into effect," said DePinto. Unfortunately the instructions Ce De got from the payroll vendor are not clear on what needs to be done. "We've been spending a lot of man hours on this," DePinto said. Scheduling anything in Outlook is also a problem. Shift schedules and appointments are all done in Outlook and there isnât one simple patch from Microsoft. "They have a multitude of different patches that you have to download and it is very involved," DePinto said. For now, changes to Outlook are being done manually at Ce De. Although there is a patch that will push out a change to all the desktops, installing it so complex that DePinto prefers to let his team update the PCs one desktop at a time.Â  Still, most enterprises are taking the change in stride and betting that disruptions, if they occur, will be minor, according to those interviewed by InfoWorld. "It is not on a Y2K scale," said Ray Repic chief technical architect at Coca-Cola Enterprises. "The only item that is a bit of a pain is with our calendaring capabilities for people who have scheduled meetings out beyond March 11." "To be honest, I've been so busy, I haven't even thought about it," said Sean Marsh, CEO of One Mortgage Network. Marsh said that outsourcing much of One Mortgage's IT operations and using service-based software like Salesforce.com has spared him some worry about the DST issue, but he's betting the downside won't be catastrophic even if he's caught unprepared. "The reality is, a one-hour difference is not going to cripple our company," said Marsh. In a worst case scenario, IT staff can manually update systems that can't be patched, then turn off the Daylight Savings Time feature so that clocks are changed again when the old DST date comes around, he said. Ultimately, scheduling will be the biggest problem for companies that haven't addressed the DST issue, so enterprises should make workers aware of the change at the very least and scrutinize appointments and meetings in the weeks in between the new March 11 Daylight Savings Time change and the old DST change in April. "The Boy Scout's model is to be prepared, and I think that's a good model for this: Plan ahead and be prepared," Sweatt said.
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By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio  Feb. 20--Many people will remember the Y2K anxiety spawned by fears that the world's computers would be unprepared to make the date change from 1999 to 2000.
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On his blog today, Joakim Nygard has posted about the use (or disuse) of time zones in PHP:   The problem with not handling timezones correctly is not apparent in the usual case of the webserver and the database server being in the same timezone. [...] Often a specific timezone is assumed for displaying date and time. This could very well be incorrect for a large number of visitors. If the database server is in yet another timezone, things begin to get out of sync.   He mentions the time zone functionality that MySQL offers too, but notes that it cannot be relied on either. Thankfully, there's is a bit of hope in PHP5 (as of 5.1 in fact) - the date_default_timezine_set function. He includes an example of the function in use, making it simple to get the correct date and time automatically with the date() function without having to do any hacks to discover the correct time zone.
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Daylight Saving Time will arrive this year earlier than it has in the past -- at 2 a.m. on March 11. Companies are scrambling to make sure their IT operations will be ready.
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But will the sun stay out tomorrow?
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A GoDaddy.com customer is seriously concerned that this domain registrar and hosting company may not be ready for the switch to DST (Daylight Saving Time) on Sunday.
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(InfoWorld) - The new DST (daylight-saving time) is drawing near. Do you think you're ready? Run down this checklist to be sure. 1. Do a datacenter inventory. You need to know exactly which applications and systems you have running so that you can locate appropriate patches and fixes. 2. Find out what needs to be patched. That could take some time. Fortunately, many of the big-name vendors have prepared (even if you haven't). Below is a list of DST resource sites for various companies. Most, if not all, include lists of solutions that will be affected. Apple BlackBerry Cisco Dell Hewlett-Packard IBM Microsoft McAfee Novell Oracle Palm Red Hat Sun Symantec Also be sure to update your JRE (Java Runtime Engine), as apps running on older versions of JRE may report incorrect times. Info is available here. If one of your vendors isn't listed above, check out their Web site or call their help desk as soon as possible and ask about DST patches. 3. Devise a game plan. Mission-critical, time-sensitive applications should take priority, but also consider software -- such as firewalls -- that isn't time sensitive but that feeds time-sensitive information to other programs, such as security event management products. 4. Deploy patches or, where necessary, manual fixes. Use your centralized software management toolbox such as Microsoft Systems Management Server or Novell ZenWork Patch Management (if you have one). Otherwise, you'll have a lot of manual patching to do. 5. Test your patches and fixes. Be certain you come up with proper times and dates. You also have to check that your applications are interacting properly. 6. Make sure your partners and service providers are prepared. Just because you've done your due diligence and updated your systems doesn't mean one of your critical suppliers, for example, has. 7. Schedule IT personnel to come in on March 11. Try as you might to prepare, it's entirely possible something will slip through the cracks. Have IT staff on hand to check the status of systems, run tests, and fix problems.
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Washington Post staff writer Charles Babington will be online to discuss how the earlier Daylight Saving Time this year may be affecting your computer or handheld device.
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Corrects comparison year to 2005 instead of 2006 in paragraph 12
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By Pete Bach, The Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wis.  Mar. 6--Many people won't lose any sleep Sunday when daylight-saving time  kicks in nearly a month early.    Another Y2K it's not, according to one computer expert.
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Customers using Microsoft products that have entered their "Extended" support phase will need to fork over $4,000 for a patch that makes the software compatible with the new March 11 date for Daylight Saving Time (DST), according to Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley.
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Since the starting and ending dates for daylight time are changing this year, do I need to adjust my computer system clock manually?
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By Bob Mims, The Salt Lake Tribune  Mar. 7--Spring ahead, fall behind, the old daylight saving saying goes.  But this year, you'll be doing that both sooner and later.
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It's a Topsy-Turvy world and that's a fact US plans to change daylight saving hours this spring could wreak havoc on computer systems, Gartner claims. The analyst firm said utomated systems could run haywire this March.â¦
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Normally the switch to daylight-saving time isn't a big deal, but this Sunday, Jeff Ronner has to put people on the case.
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By Mike Hughlett, Chicago Tribune  Mar. 9--You may be set to spring forward Sunday and enjoy more evening sunshine courtesy of daylight-saving time. But your computer might not be.