IT Support Small Medium Business

Without thinking, I said to myself, the clock needs to be set manually only twice a year to accommodate the 2007 DST changes, on computer systems aware of DST rules but not patched for the 2007 DST changes. For example,

• AS/400 before OS/400 v5r3
• Blackberry running beta releases of firmware from RIM (Research In Motion) or elsewhere
• VAX running OpenVMS with older compiler
• HP-UX 10.20 servers
  

Well, that’s not true, at second thought. You actually need to set the clock three times a year every year, instead of twice. Read the rest of this entry »

In order to prepare a development web server running Redhat Linux 9 for 2007 DST changes, I upgraded its glibc from 2.3.2-27 to 2.3.2-71 to take advantage of tzdata rpm packages updated for 2007 DST changes.

• glibc-2.3.2-64 is the earliest version of glibc RPM that has separated timezone data into a new rpm named tzdata (More details can be found here).
• A backend Sybase ASE server also runs RHL 9, but with a newer glibc-2.3.2-71. The latter was recommended by Michael Peppler for Sybase ASE 12.5 on RHL9 to get around certain bugs in the glibc RPM package shipped with the original RHL9. Read the rest of this entry »

As described in how to verify 2007 DST readiness on Linux systems, you can verify 2007 DST change readiness by setting the system clock to future date. This is applicable to Windows systems too. If “automatic updates” is turned on in Windows Security Center on your windows systems (Windows XP desktop or Windows 2003 servers), the DST patch mostly had been applied.

Either that, or you’ve manually updated your systems in prep for the 2007 DST changes. Now the only thing left to do is to verify. Here are a few quick steps to verify 2007 DST change readiness on your Windows systems by using the Date and Time properties panel. The latter can be launched by double clicking the time displayed at the system tray, usually in the bottom right corner of your Windows systems. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post, I theorized that tzdata RPM from FC1 (Fedora Core 1) updates repository would be useful to prepare old Linux systems such as RHL 9 (redhat Linux 9) or older, without having to upgrade glibc and glibc-common packages. It turned out that the original RHL 9 release had /usr/share/zoneinfo as part of glibc rpm package. It remains to be the case unless glibc rpm is upgraded to version 2.3.2-64 (Mon Jul 28 2003) or newer. Therefore, the glibc actually does need to be upgraded to at least 2.3.2-64, to take advantage of the steps to prepare older Linux systems for 2007 DST changes using an updated tzdata rpm as discussed in an earlier post. Read the rest of this entry »

I pushed the 2007 DST patch manager 2.2 to a dozen of Blackberry 7270 handhelds from our BES using Software Configuration policy. Under Options/2007 DST Patch, the patch manager complained it could not find the patch, or couldn’t download the patch, and will retry at a later time. All test units complained one way or the other. Read the rest of this entry »