Daylight Savings 2007 — this time it’s a mess

by billso on Tuesday, 13 February 2007

From the SANS Insti­tute, here’s an arti­cle by Deb­o­rah Hale that dis­cusses how the US and Cana­dian change to an ear­lier Day­light Sav­ings Time affects var­i­ous fla­vors of Microsoft Win­dows, Linux, and other sys­tems. I men­tioned this change last week.

There are patches for Red Hat Linux, one of the most pop­u­lar fla­vors of that oper­at­ing system.

Five weeks to go, and Win­dows Vista is ready out of the box.

There is a patch avail­able for Win­dows XP. Ser­vice Pack 2 must already be installed, how­ever. Run Win­dows Update or Microsoft Update for more details about your machine.

Win­dows 2000 requires a man­ual process to update the reg­istry, the mas­sive data­base that Win­dows uses to store hard­ware and soft­ware infor­ma­tion on a com­puter. Frankly, any­one who’s run­ning Win­dows 2000 at this point needs to upgrade.

There is no offi­cial patch for ear­lier ver­sions of Win­dows (ME, 98, 95, 3.x). It really is “time” to upgrade! (rimshot)

Also, users and admin­is­tra­tors should check with soft­ware ven­dors to see if appli­ca­tions, util­i­ties, and other soft­ware requires a patch. There’s a deeper dis­cus­sion in this Com­put­er­World arti­cle, focus­ing on Java appli­ca­tions as an exam­ple. Com­put­er­World also offers this list of ven­dors and the DST patches or solu­tions that they’ve announced.

What a mess. At least it’s not as bad as Y2K or the intro­duc­tion of the Euro (€).

At least World­Time­Server will get the time right.

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