Daylight-saving time issue reappears on IT radar

The daylight-saving time scramble of last spring may be in need of a cleanup this fall for companies that spent the summer rolling out new servers, desktops and time-sensitive applications.

On Nov. 4, clocks will “fall back” to standard time, but companies with systems that are not patched will fall back a week early throwing off calendars, transaction systems and anything that relies on clock time for accuracy and execution.
daylight-saving time (DST) comes to a close one week later this year – Nov. 4 instead of Oct. 28 – as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

DST began three weeks earlier this year, kicking off March 11. That milestone had corporate users scrambling to patch systems so they would not suffer time-related hiccups in their operating systems, applications and other infrastructure.
Early this year, most major IT vendors, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and Sun rolled out DST fixes for their products.

Now the “fall back” side of the DST issue could be a problem for those who rolled out new computers or applications after March 11. If those systems have not been updated with the correct DST patches they will revert to standard time a week early.

“That will make you an hour late to all your meetings,” says Eric Schultze, chief security architect for patch vendor Shavlik Technologies. “Companies without patch management processes that scrambled in March are going to scramble again.”
Schultze says machines that were patched last spring are set. “It is the computers you just bought last month that might not  have the patches on them or the systems you have rebuilt that need the patch reapplied,” he says.

On the Microsoft Windows side, Schultze says even those new Vista machines will need a patch.

The good news is that Windows users who use Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Microsoft’s online patch site, will have had the DST patch automatically loaded onto systems configured to run WSUS. The patch supports Vista, Windows Server 2003 and XP SP2. A DST patch for products in extended support, such as Windows 2000, XP Gold or XP SP1, is $4,000 from Microsoft. However, patch vendors such as Shavlik have built a replica of the extended support patch and make it available to their customers.