PLEASE BE ADVISED - EARLY DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TRANSITION - MARCH 11 2007

You probably already know that the transition to daylight savings time (DST) is happening 3 weeks "early" this year (on March 11th). What may not be so immediately obvious, is that this has the potential to wreak a certain amount of havoc with any computer-based-system which keeps track of the date and time, and which tries to adjust for DST automatically by itself.

Typically this is addressed by the operating system (Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS, etc) and then all software on a system will accept "as a given" that the time is correct. (Thus, in theory, it is most important that the operating system software is patched / updated to cope with the DST change this year -- but that patching all software on a given computer should not be necessary).

Alas, as is often the case, there is some ambiguity about how well the patches will work; what the consequences are if they fail to work as expected ; and of course the impact of software which "does its own thing" (i.e., doesn't rely on the system for time) - and thus may need to be patched separately, or maybe not - who can say?! :-)

THE BOTTOM LINE Monday morning, it is entirely possible we'll see a variety of odd things on a range of computers and servers. Examples of joy might include:

  • Your desktop PC might think the time is wrong by one hour
  • Appointments in Microsoft outlook might be confused
  • E-mails might appear to be delivered one hour before they were sent, or might appear to have been delivered one hour in the future. (They will still be delivered - don't worry about that - just that the time stamps might be a mess!)
  • etc,etc etc.

I will try to address specific obvious problems as they crop up on Monday. Known problems will be posted below. IF you have observed a problem which is NOT posted below, please send me an email (tim.chipman@phys.ocean.dal.ca) letting me know of the new problem. Please do NOT email me to let me know about known problems!

Any further updates will also be linked from this page.

I hope this is moderately clear and of some use.

---Tim Chipman

UPDATES

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KNOWN PROBLEMS