* Taking preventative measures will help you in the long run
Like my mother told me many years ago, “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away.”
While I rarely eat apples, the message stuck with me. There are times in life and work when taking preventative measures will help you in the long run. In network and systems management, that is a rule to work by daily. The more proactive IT managers can be, the further in front of problems they can keep their devices and systems, the more likely they will keep their networks healthy.
One recent example of taking time to prepare in advance of a potential issue and reduce subsequent upset had IT managers in many parts of North America recently endured the same administrative burden of updating systems to comply with the new daylight-saving time (DST) change.
In an effort to save oil (up to 100,000 barrels per day), legislators a couple years back passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which moved the DST schedule from the first Sunday in April back to the second Sunday in March. The fall changes move the time changes from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November. This change, while not as disruptive as Y2K, promised to cause issues on IT systems set up to automatically handle the old schedule.
Efforts in many IT shops first started this past fall and culminated last week as DST changes planned since 2005 went into full effect. For instance, Todd Wilson, Operations Manager of Enterprise Services at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Md., says his organizations efforts started last fall.
“We started looking at the DST issue about Nov. 14, 2006. We knew we were going have issues late December. We were part of the Exchange 2007 RDP (Rapid Deployment Program) some of us noted that as we moved to Outlook 2007 we were getting a calendar rebase. At that time we did not really know the impact it would cause,” Wilson says.
Last week Wilson reported no major problems other than “one server issue. Our backup server did not like the DST change this year and had issues. It is a [Windows 2000] server with the patch from [Microsoft].”
Others such as Priscilla Milam, associate vice chancellor of IT operations for the North Harris Montgomery Community College District in The Woodlands, Texas, started her organization’s update plans a bit later but still had mostly positive results.
“Because we have multiple sites with one instance of Exchange, we had to coordinate both the server patches and client patches with our various locations,” she explains. “With enterprise systems that had no client impact we simply patched those servers according to vendor recommendations.”
Milam says her organization also enlisted end users to update parts of their systems. “We asked them to patch by sending out an e-mail communication twice, then ran the server version to reduce the time spent at the server on each calendar, in order to catch those that didn’t do their own patching,” she explains. “We had some BlackBerry users who were out of sync but otherwise we have had no issues.”
Craig Bush, network administrator at Exactech in Gainesville, Fla., says his approach to get systems synched up with DST changes included automated patching and some manual work.
“Most systems required few changes. Microsoft was the most complicated, but even that was made easy by our use of Desktop Authority (from ScriptLogic) and Microsoft’s article on deploying the time zone update scripts through Active Directory and group policy,” Bush reports. “Some systems like our BlackBerries required manual patching, and I manually updated some servers that were Windows 2000. This was almost 99% complete by February.”
The work in February paid off for Bush in March. “So far, so good. We haven’t had any issues related to the time change. Everything seems to have changed over OK,” he reports.
