Are you ready for the 2007 Daylight Savings time changes?
26 February 2007 17:05

As part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Savings Time begins earlier and ends later than usual this year (Mar 11th and Nov 4th). If you're a systems, network, or database administrator, it's worth your while to take a close look to make sure your systems are patched if necessary.

This change may potentially affect just about all the systems you manage, servers, databases, storage, routers, switches, PBXes, cell phones, and so on and so on.

On most RedHat/Fedora Linux systems you can tell if your system is patched by doing the following:

/usr/sbin/zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

If you see references to March 11th, and Nov 4th in the output, you're good to go. If not, you need to patch. Some Googling around will help you find what measures are necessary for other operating systems and software. For Fedora Core since at least FC2, you simply need to yum update your tzdata package, and then copy or link the right timezone file out of /usr/share/zoneinfo to /etc/localtime. For earlier RedHat, the timezone data was part of the glibc-common package, so updating that is a bit more tricky.

The Wikipedia article referenced above posits a good question, will all the effort and time needed to patch and upgrade systems offset any theoretical productivity gains that come as a result of this act?