Daylight Savings Time Info

Our geniuses in the US Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005.   Starting in the spring of 2007, they changed the daylight saving time (DST) start and end dates for the United States.  They passed this law, without taking into account the changes that are required to make computers run.  It is more complicated than many people know, because of computer security and the Kerberos token.  See this Microsoft website for info about Kerberos. 

There are conditions where the change in time can cripple your entire network, break your applications, and ruin your data. Google reports that the impact is concerning every aspect of IT:  database managers, banking, the FDA, the airlines, Windows Mobile and Blackberries, etc.

Microsoft released Patches in November.  However, several state legislatures (with geniuses equal to the intelligence of the US Congress), decided to “tweak” their state’s time zones.  Like their better paid brethren in Washington, these states didn’t consult the codeslingers of the world either.

The final patches from Microsoft were released in Mid February.  At least with Y2K, we had about a decade to address the issues.  With this self inflicted wound, we had 26 days from release to implementation.

There has been massive sleep loss...  JK Technologies has developed solutions for all of our customers.  We have patched all of the machines under our maintenance contracts.  We adjusted the settings on older machines under our maintenance contracts. We have fixed other networks as we were authorized to do so.

We'll deal with the other calls as quickly as possible.

However, it is not as simple as installing a few files and changing settings in the registry.  Exchange appointments must be manually harvested and reset.  SQL has problems.  Windows 2000 users are left out of the “easy patch”  Microsoft is charging up to $4000 for the patches for Server 2000 because Server 2000 is no longer supported and the telephone wait times are about ½ a day, per server.   JK Technologies can fix a Server 2000 machine in about 5 minutes....  

We built a server to harvest and reset Exchange appointments.  Customers with less than 30 appointments in the next 3 weeks should just change them by hand.  We can use our ExchangeTool Server to harvest and reset all Exchange appointments on your server.

It’s a major problem.  If you’re interested, Google “DST Change Microsoft”  There are over 1,000,000 hits.  Add 931836 to see the specific Microsoft recommendations (it cuts it down to about 13,000 websites.)

As a courtesy, the Microsoft Windows patches can be downloaded here.  These patches do not repair data loss or data corruption and cannot fix schedules.