Daylight Savings Time Change - Not "automagic"

[LeftHander]

If you haven't heard yet...

Daylight Saving Time is changing. On March 11 this year we will set the clocks ahead. Rather the end of April...big deal? Maybe not for your clock or wristwatch. But for tens of thousands of servers, applications with embedded JAVA it is a big deal. Without patching the servers will not "automagially" know what time it is.

Implications are that JAVA based applications and middle ware that are unpatched and systems that do not recognize the new DST rules will incorrectly make time based calculations after March 11.

IT departments are scrambling across the country as well as software vendors to provide support for DST2007 compliance.

Many systems track time by counting seconds from a specific date, then local rules are applied by client applications to display the correct time for the user location. Other applications can store data as timestamps with embedded time zone information requiring mass data updates. (Some Oracle 10g databases for instance)

Java installations, JRE, JVM etc. hold time zone information with in the JAVA implementation and these files need to be upgraded. Some application require specific version of the JAVA runtime environment and these JAVA implementations will require patching.

Embedded controllers may not have the rule changes and thus systems will be activated at improper times based on the DST changes.

The DST changes have caught many vendors off guard as evident by rapid changes to Tech notes as issues are discovered.

Stupid law. Stupid time change. IT people if you haven't yet, do your checking for DST2007 compliance as errors are bound to creep in over time.