Daylight Savings Fun
Posted on March 13, 2007
2 Comments
Early this morning, I noticed some of my nightly jobs seemed to be running late the last couple of days. A closer inspection showed that my Windows 2000 servers (dev and prod) were all an hour off. Whoops, Daylight Savings Time!
Well dang, for some reason I thought I’d seen a patch for that go through recently, but perhaps I’m confusing that with the 2003 servers or XP workstations?
Anyways, I didn’t give it much thought, I just made the rounds of the servers and adjusted all the clocks up an hour. Boy, in hindsight, that was sure dumb.
Suddenly all the workstations advanced their clocks an hour (they sync with the Active Directory controller). “No problem,” I told the folks, “just nudge it back. Probably related to the server time change I just made.”
Forty-five minutes later all the clocks moved forward again. *grumble* I was busy, I didn’t give it much thought and just told folks to deal with it and I’d bounce the server tonight. Surely that would cure it.
Then we got word that one of our web services was using bad GMT time-stamps that were exactly one hour away from accurate. Transactions were failing. Oh …. crap …. I suddenly realized there’s more to DST than just nudging the clock forward.
After a bit of searching, I found the article, How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007. As I suddenly cared a lot more and was in a hurry, the single-machine approach made the most sense. (granted, I got to do it 6 times…). Hooray for tzedit! Problem fixed.
Moral of the Story
You know there’s got to be a moral. I just haven’t figure out what it might be.
Tags: daylight-savings-time, DST, microsoft, servers, windows-2000
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2 Responses to “Daylight Savings Fun”
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Some more fun: Since I rarely update my machine, my clock was behind an hour. I moved it up an hour, and all was fine. Then I synced with a time server, and it went back. Oy vey!
Today I tried installing the patch, but the Genuine Validation tool only works if the clock is correct. So I moved it ahead, installed the patch, and then it was an hour ahead of real time!
Lol Michael - fun stuff, eh?