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Perth's own Y2K
Western Australia is introducing Daylight savings, but are the computers ready for it?
Let me start out by saying that Y2K never really finished. Most people think that the bug only affects computers at the brink of the year 2000, but in reality many software packages and hardware chips have their own Y2K-like bugs such as Microsoft Excel 97 occurring in 2013.
That's not to say that this article is about Y2K, but about a much more looming issue, the introduction of Daylight saving in Perth, Western Australia. Perth's roll-out of Daylight Saving is set to cause problems on a similar level to Y2K, but without any time to allocated to preparation (less than a month)
The idea with Daylight Saving is that you adjust your clocks earlier in summer to shift an hour of sun in the morning to an hour of sun in the evening. When the summer season ends, you shift your clock forward to return to normal time.
In Western Australia, three referendums have been hosted since 1975, each with a resounding lack of support for daylight saving, but the WA labour party has now backed a 3 year trial beginning in December 2006.
Politics aside, it turns out that the rest of the world may not have been ready for Perth's switch to Daylight Saving. Anyone who's ever installed Microsoft Windows will know that the checkbox for daylight saving is greyed out as a result of those three referendums.
Back in the 'old days' daylight saving was just a matter of winding your watches forward and switching to and from daylight saving time was relatively simple, but with the introduction of Kerberos authentication for Active Directory Domains Windows now relies heavily on the system clock to perform part of the authentication process. If the clocks on two PCs are more than 5 minutes apart you can not authenticate. Some users suggest simply setting your clock forward by one hour, but Microsoft says this can have quite unpredictable results in Windows.
Microsoft will most likely release a patch to allow users in the WA timezone to switch on daylight saving, such as the one available here for the eastern states' change to their daylight saving start date.
UPDATE: Microsoft have released a patch for Perth DST and it is available here
However, expecting Microsoft to release the patch and for all users to install it by December 3rd is a bit much. It's been shown again and again that many users do not patch their computers in a timely manner, if they do at all.
Microsoft do have a time zone editor which will let you manually adjust the time for daylight saving and it is available as part of the resource kit, it's not for every user, but network administrators have no other choice at the moment.
There's more to this story that just windows, There are a number of hardware devices such parking metres, alarm systems and automatic door locks that will need to be inspected twice a year to have their clocks pushed back and then forward again at the end of the daylight saving period.
~Great if you work in the alarm and electronic door industry...
Now i'm not against daylight saving, but it's going to make Perth's first forage into daylight saving potentially quite rushed and It's probably quite amusing that we're going ahead with a change and no one has thought to "ask" Microsoft if it's ok.
Anyway I'm off to run Anaconda on my fedora box and see if it has support for Daylight Saving in Perth.
The Funny Side: WA Stands up for daylight saving
Mic (Wednesday, 22 November 2006)
I know where I work there will be a mad rush to get our systems updated. Many customers are charged based on time of day. The company that supports our system is the only one who can make the changes, but they have limited resources, and all their customers who use the same system will want the changes within the next week. The process to allow Perth daylight savings will take several days of updating and restarting business critical servers. There is no time to test it properly now, so if there is a problem there will be a lot of angry customers and possible legal issues over breach of contract with customers. Why only 2 weeks notice?... | Andrew Buckeridge (Thursday, 23 November 2006)
I hope all this will be gone at the next referendum.
Just put in a numeric offset from GMT rather than junk up time zone config just for this nonsense.
RFC 822 Posix
DST +0900 GST-9
Standard +0800 GST-8
The risks in chaging to DST is that cron jobs may not run.
The risk in going back to standard time is of file corruption as locks in crons have either not
been tested or are not used.
You need to pick the time that you switch the computer in and out of DST very carefully. |
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