Daylight Savings Time
Well, folks, the infinite wisdom of those folks in the US Congress has demonstrated itself yet again. The modification of the rules for going onto and off daylight savings time has created a fair amount of inconvenience (if you are a computer user) and downright extra work (if you are in a corporate IT position). Unfortunately, while the vendors understand they need to make changes, they haven't really investigated what is needed in total to achieve success. Therefore, we have patches from one vendor that are dependant on another vendor to be successful.Let me give one concrete example, from last week's experience. The Help Desk began receiving calls that appointments in late March appeared to be an hour late. Shortly after getting some of those, we started receiving additional calls that the working hours in late March were showing later than they should be shown. Well, after digging into all this, it turns out we did appropriately patch our Novell GroupWise application (version 7). What we didn't know, though, was that there was dependency on the Windows desktop knowing about the change as well. The Novell patch was delivered in February, and we duly installed it. From the server perspective, it worked as advertised. However, on a desktop, which we didn't examine closely enough, it did not work. Microsoft delivered their patch in mid-February, too late for us, as it turns out. We have pushed it out via WSUS, but the for the additional three weeks in March and the one week in November appointments are an hour late. And at that, we're fortunate since we're geographically limited to a single time zone. I suspect it would be worse for those that span time zones, particularly outside the US. We're in recovery mode right now, and should have everyone back to snuff next week.
This certainly isn't Y2K, but we are spending more time investigating time dependent systems. In particular, we are looking at those that are outside our network, but look at the time for handling functions like adjusting environmental conditions or locking / unlocking doors.
Just when you thought it was safe to back into the water ........
posted by Craig @ 5:12 PM
