Daylight Savings 2007 - this time it’s a mess

ism tech

Posted Tuesday, 13 February 2007, 14:01 HST @959

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.